The Penguin History of Modern Russia

3 Conflicts and Crises (1917)

Disputes intensified after the February Revolution about the future of the old Russian Empire. Hardly any politicians, generals or businessmen advocated a return of the monarchy; it was widely taken for granted that the state would become a republic. Yet the precise constitutional form to be chosen by the republic was contentious. The Kadets wished to retain a unitary administration and opposed any subdivision of the empire into a federation of nationally-based territorial units. Their aim was to rule through the traditional network of provinces.¹ In contrast, the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries wanted to accede to the national aspirations of the non-Russian population. In particular, they intended to grant regional self-government to Ukraine, which had been merely a collection of provinces in the tsarist period. When the Kadets argued that this would ultimately bring about the disintegration of the state, the Mensheviks and the Socialist-Revolutionaries replied that it offered the sole way to prevent separatist movements from breaking up the state.

The Kadets played for time, stipulating that any regional reorganization would have to await decision by the Constituent Assembly. But popular opinion was shifting against them on many other policies. In particular, the liberal ministers were regarded as having expansionist war aims even after the resignation of Milyukov, the arch-expansionist, from the cabinet.

Yet the Kadets in the Provisional Government, despite being faced by problems with the non-Russians, felt inhibited about making a patriotic appeal exclusively to the Russians. Liberal ministers were understandably wary lest they might irritate the internationalist sensibility of the Mensheviks and the Socialist-Revolutionaries. In any case, Russian nationalism was not very attractive to most Russians, who could see for themselves that their non-Russian fellow citizens were as keen as they were to defend the country. There was a general feeling that ordinary folk of all nationalities were oppressed by the same material difficulties. Not having been very nationalistic before the Great War, Russians did not suddenly become so in 1917. On the whole, they responded most positively to slogans which had a direct bearing on their everyday lives: workers’ control, land, bread, peace and freedom. And they assumed that what was good for their locality was good for the entire society.

Yet although the Russians did not act together as a nation, Russian workers, peasants and soldiers caused difficulties for the cabinet. It was in the industrial cities where the soviets, trade unions and factory-workshop committees were concentrated; and since Russians constituted a disproportionately large segment of factory workers, they were to the fore in helping to form these bodies. Furthermore, such bodies were instruments of political mobilization; they were also dedicated to the country’s rapid cultural development.² And they established their internal hierarchies. In early June, for example, soviets from all over the country sent representatives to Petrograd to the First All-Russia Congress of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. This Congress elected a Central Executive Committee to co-ordinate all soviets across the country. A potential alternative framework of administration was being constructed.

Meanwhile the Provisional Government depended on its marriage of convenience with socialists. Liberal ministers gritted their teeth because they recognized that the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries alone could preserve them in power. They had to hope that eventually they would be in a position to annul the marriage and rule without socialist interference. This was always a bit of a gamble, being based on the premiss that no trouble would arise from the other large socialist party which was consolidating itself after the February Revolution: the Bolsheviks. Initially the gamble did not seem a very long shot. The Bolsheviks were a minority in the Petrograd Soviet; there were even those among them who were willing to contemplate giving conditional support to the Provisional Government. Perhaps the Bolsheviks, too, could be embraced in the marital arrangement.

But all this was set to change. On 3 April, Lenin came back to Russia via Germany in a train put at his disposal by the German government. He returned to a party divided on strategy, and he quickly found that there were plenty of Bolsheviks eager to support a policy of vigorous opposition to the cabinet. The February Revolution had disappointed all Bolsheviks. Against their expectations, the monarchy’s overthrow had not been followed by a ‘provisional revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry’; and the Bolsheviks had failed to gain control over the Petrograd Soviet.

For some weeks they had been in disarray. Several of their leaders — including Lev Kamenev and Iosif Stalin — favoured some co-operation with the Mensheviks; but Lenin put a stop to this. When Kamenev boarded his train on its way to Petrograd, Lenin expostulated: ‘What have you been writing in Pravda? We’ve seen a few copies and called you all sorts of names!’³ Despite not having been in Russia for ten years and having had flimsy contact with fellow Bolsheviks since 1914, he articulated a strategy that successfully expressed the anger of those who detested the Provisional Government. On 4 April he presented his April Theses to comrades in the Tauride Palace. Lenin’s central thought involved a reconstruction of Bolshevism. He called upon the party to build up majorities in the soviets and other mass organizations and then to expedite the transfer of power to them. Implicitly he was urging the overthrow of the Provisional Government and the inception of a socialist order.⁴

His audience was stunned: no Bolshevik had previously suggested that the ‘transition to socialism’ might be inaugurated instantly after the monarchy’s removal. The party’s conventional notion had been that Russia would still require an epoch of capitalist economic development. Yet the Bolsheviks had also always stressed that the bourgeoisie could not be trusted to establish political democracy and that a temporary ‘democratic dictatorship’ should be set up by socialists. Essentially Lenin was now striking out the qualification that socialist rule should be temporary.⁵

The ideas of the April Theses were accepted by the Seventh Party Conference at the end of the month; and his party cut its remaining links with the Mensheviks. Without Lenin, the crystallization of a far-left opposition to the Provisional Government would have taken longer. But while he chopped away at his party’s formal doctrines, undoubtedly he was working with the grain of its impatience and militancy. All Bolshevik leaders had always hated Nicholas II and liberals with equal venom. Few were squeamish about the methods that might be used to achieve the party’s ends. Dictatorship was thought desirable, terror unobjectionable. Bolsheviks wanted to reduce the schedule for the eventual attainment of communism. Their lives had been dedicated to revolutionary aims. Hardly any veteran Bolshevik had evaded prison and Siberian exile before 1917; and, while operating in the clandestine conditions, each had had to put up with much material distress. Lenin’s return gave them the leadership they wanted.

Those who disliked his project either joined the Menshevik party or abandoned political involvement altogether.⁶ The Bolshevik party anticipated socialist revolution across Europe as well as in Russia. The word went forth from Petrograd that when the Bolsheviks took power, great changes would immediately be set in motion. By midsummer 1917 they had worked out slogans of broad appeal: peace; bread; all power to the soviets; workers’ control; land to the peasants; and national self-determination.

The Bolshevik party adhered to democratic procedures only to the extent that its underlying political purpose was being served; and the circumstances after the February Revolution fulfilled this condition. In May and June the Bolsheviks increased their representation at the expense of the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries in many factory committees and some soviets. The party is said to have expanded its membership to 300,000 by the end of the year. Apparently about three fifths of Bolsheviks were of working-class background.⁷ Such was the expansive revolutionary spirit among them that the Bolshevik leaders were carried away by it at least to some extent. And unlike the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, the Bolsheviks had neither any governmental responsibility nor many administrative burdens in the soviets. They had the time to conduct inflammatory propaganda, and they used it.

Intellectuals of middle-class origins were prominent in the party’s higher echelons; the return of the émigrés — including Trotski, who worked alongside the Bolsheviks from summer 1917 after years of antagonism to Lenin — reinforced the phenomenon. Their skills in writing articles and proclamations and in keeping records were essential to party bodies. Yet the fact that practices of electivity and accountability pervaded the party impeded Bolshevik intellectuals from doing just as they pleased. At any rate, Bolsheviks were united by their wish for power and for socialism regardless of class origins. From Lenin downwards there was a veritable rage to engage in revolutionary action.⁸ Lenin revelled in his party’s mood. At the First All-Russia Congress of Soviets in June 1917, the Menshevik Irakli Tsereteli commented that no party existed that would wish to take power alone. Lenin, from the floor, corrected him: ‘There is!’⁹

Liberal ministers, however, were almost as worried about the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries as about the Bolsheviks. In late June, when the Provisional Government decided to recognize the Ukrainian Rada as the organ of regional government in Kiev, the Kadets walked out of the cabinet.¹⁰ This could not have happened at a worse time. A Russian military offensive had been started on the Eastern front’s southern sector: Prince Lvov and Alexander Kerenski, his War Minister, wanted to prove Russia’s continuing usefulness to her Allies and to gain support at home by means of military success. But German reinforcements were rushed to the Austro-Hungarian lines and Russian forces had to retreat deep into Ukraine. And in those very same days the Bolsheviks were making mischief in Petrograd. They had tried to hold their own separate demonstration against the cabinet earlier in June — and only a last-minute intervention by the First All-Russia Congress of Soviets stopped them. The inhabitants of Petrograd were gripped by the uncertainty of the situation.

The Bolshevik Central Committee drew encouragement from the crisis, and planned to hold yet another armed demonstration in the capital on 3 July. Evidently if things went his way, Lenin might opt to turn the crisis into an opportunity to seize power.¹¹ The Provisional Government quickly issued a banning order. Unnerved by this display of political will, the Bolshevik Central Committee urged the assembled workers and troops, who had sailors from the Kronstadt naval garrison among them, to disperse. By then Lenin had absented himself from the scene, and was spending his time at a dacha at Neivola in the Finnish countryside. But the crowd wanted its demonstration. The sailors from the Kronstadt naval garrison were prominent among the more unruly elements, but local workers and soldiers were also determined to march through the central streets of Petrograd. The Provisional Government ordered reliable troops to break up the demonstration by firing on it. Dozens of people were killed.

Ministers held the Bolshevik Central Committee responsible for the clashes even though it had refrained from participating in the demonstration. Ministry of Internal Affairs officials claimed that the Bolsheviks had received money from the German government. Lenin and Zinoviev managed to flee into hiding in Finland, but Trotski, Kamenev and Alexandra Kollontai were caught and imprisoned. In Petrograd, if not in most other cities, the Bolshevik party reverted to being a clandestine party.

These complications were too much for Prince Lvov, who resigned in favour of his War Minister, Kerenski. Russia’s ruin was ineluctable, according to Lvov, unless her socialists agreed to take prime responsibility for the affairs of state. Certainly Kerenski was already a master of the arts of twentieth-century political communication. He wore his patriotism on his sleeve. He was a brilliant orator, receiving standing ovations from his audiences and especially from women who were enraptured by his charm. He had a picture designed of himself and printed on tens of thousands of postcards; he had newsreels made of his major public appearances. Kerenski was temperamental, but he was also energetic and tenacious. He had carefully kept contact with all the parties willing to lend support to the Provisional Government, and had avoided favouritism towards his own Party of Socialist-Revolutionaries. Kerenski believed he had positioned himself so as to be able to save Russia from political disintegration and military defeat.

His elevation had been meteoric since the February Revolution. Born in 1881 in Simbirsk, he was just thirty-six years old when he succeeded Prince Lvov. By training he was a lawyer and had specialized in the defence of arrested revolutionaries. He also was acquainted with many leading figures in Russian public life through membership of the main Freemasons’ lodge in Petrograd; but he had no experience in administration. And he was thrust into power at a time of the greatest crisis for the country since the Napoleonic invasion of 1812.

His delight at being invited to replace Prince Lvov was followed by weeks of difficulty even in putting a cabinet together. The rationale of his assumption of power was that socialists ought to take a majority of ministerial portfolios; but Tsereteli, the leading Menshevik minister under Lvov, stood down in order to devote his attention to the business of the soviets. Most Kadets, too, rejected Kerenski’s overtures to join him. Not until 25 July could he announce the establishment of a Second Coalition. It is true that he had managed to ensure that ten out of the seventeen ministers, including himself, were socialists. Even the Socialist-Revolutionary leader Chernov agreed to stay on as Minister of Agriculture. Moreover, three Kadets were persuaded to ignore their party’s official policy and join the cabinet. Nevertheless Kerenski was exhausted even before his premiership began, and already he was sustaining himself by recourse to morphine and cocaine.

He focused his cabinet’s attention on the political and economic emergencies in Russia. Diplomatic discussions with the Allies were not abandoned, but there was no serious planning of further offensives on the Eastern front. Nor did Kerenski place obstacles in the way of Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries who sought to bring the war to an end by convoking a conference of socialist parties from all combatant countries in Stockholm.¹² In fact the conference was prevented from taking place by the intransigence of the Allied governments, which stopped British and French delegates from attending. It had been a doomed effort from the start, as Lenin was pleased to note.

The Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries retorted that there was no greater plausibility in Lenin’s plan to bring the military struggle to a halt by means of a ‘European socialist revolution’; they contended that the Bolsheviks overlooked the will and the capacity of both the Allies and the Central Powers to fight it out to the war’s bitter end. In the interim Kerenski had two priorities. First, he wanted to reimpose the government’s authority in the towns and at the front; second, he aimed to secure a more regular supply of food from the countryside. He signalled his firmness by appointing General Lavr Kornilov, an advocate of stern measures against unruly soviets, as Supreme Commander of Russian armed forces. He also refused — at least initially — to accede to the peasants’ demands for increased prices for their products. A complete state monopoly on the grain trade had been announced in March and comprehensive food rationing in April. Kerenski gave an assurance that his cabinet would bring a new efficiency to the task of guaranteeing the availability of bread for urban consumption.

But he could not keep his promises. Foreign financial support became harder to obtain; and although a ‘Liberty Loan’ was raised at home, this still had to be supplemented by an accelerated emission of banknotes by the Ministry of Finances.¹³ An accelerated rate of inflation was the inevitable result. It was of little comfort to Kerenski that the harvest of 1917 was only three per cent lower than the total for 1916.¹⁴ Peasants continued to refuse to release their stocks until there was a stable currency and an abundance of industrial products. On 27 August the cabinet reluctantly licensed a doubling of prices offered for wheat. But little improvement in food supplies followed. In October, the state was obtaining only fifty-six per cent of the grain procured in the same month in the previous year, and Petrograd held stocks sufficient only to sustain three days of rations.¹⁵

The military situation was equally discouraging. After repelling the Russian offensive in June, the German commanders drew up plans for an offensive of their own on the northern sector of the Eastern front. Russia’s prospects were grim. Her soldiers had become ill-disciplined and had begun to ask whether the war was worth fighting, especially when they suspected that the Provisional Government might still be pursuing expansionist aims. They were agitated, too, by talk that a comprehensive expropriation of the landed gentry’s estates was imminent. Desertions occurred on a massive scale. The German advance met with the weakest resistance since the start of the war. Riga was lost by the Russians on 22 August. No natural obstacle lay in the five hundred kilometres separating the German army and the Russian capital. The Provisional Government could no longer be confident of avoiding military defeat and territorial dismemberment.

The fortunes of war and revolution were tightly interwoven; Kerenski’s chances of surviving as Minister-Chairman depended in practice upon the performance of Allied armies on the Western front. Were the British and French to lose the battles of the summer, the Germans would immediately overrun Russia. The obverse side of this was the possibility that if the Allies were quickly to defeat Germany, they would relieve the Provisional Government’s position because Russia would gain prestige and security as a victor power. Unfortunately for the Provisional Government, the Central Powers were nowhere near to military collapse in summer and autumn 1917.

Trepidation about the situation led to a rightward shift in opinion among the middle and upper social classes. Their leading figures were annoyed by Kerenski’s manoeuvres to maintain support among the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries; they had come to regard even the Kadets as hopelessly weak and inept. The problem for middle-class opinion was that the other anti-socialist organizations were weaker still. The Union of the Russian People had virtually ceased activity and its leaders had gone into hiding. Their close association with the monarchy before the February Revolution left them discredited. While most citizens endorsed political freedom and national tolerance there was no chance that the traditional political right would make a comeback — and citizen Nikolai Romanov said nothing that might encourage monarchists: he and his family lived as unobtrusively as they could in sleepy Tobolsk in western Siberia from July 1917.¹⁶

Even the Russian Orthodox Church, freed at last from the constraints of tsarism, resisted the temptation to play the nationalist card. Bishops and priests dedicated their energies to internal debates on spirituality and organization. When an Assembly (Sobor) was held in August, politics were largely avoided. Months of discussions followed. Only in November did the Assembly feel ready to elect a Patriarch for the first time since 1700. The choice fell upon Metropolitan Tikhon, who had lived abroad for much of his life and was untainted by association with tsarism.¹⁷

And so it fell to elements in the army to take up the cause of the political right. Most Russian military commanders were steadily losing any respect they had for Kerenski. Initially Kornilov and Kerenski had got on well together, and had agreed on the need for greater governmental control over the soviets and for the reintroduction of capital punishment for military desertion. Both called for the restoration of ‘order’. But Kerenski was soon irked by Kornilov, who allowed himself to be greeted ecstatically by right-wing political sympathizers on his visits from the Eastern front. Kerenski, having summoned Kornilov to Petrograd to stiffen the Provisional Government’s authority, changed his mind and countermanded the transfer of any troops. On 27 August, Kornilov decided that this was a sign of the cabinet’s ultimate abandonment of the programme of necessary action already agreed with him. He pressed onwards to Petrograd in open mutiny.¹⁸

Kerenski stood down the Second Coalition and governed through a small inner group of trusted ministers. The emergency was made even more acute by the bad news from the Eastern front, where Riga had fallen to the Germans only five days before. Kerenski had no choice but to turn for assistance to the very Petrograd Soviet which he had lately been trying to bring to heel. The response was immediate and positive. Bolsheviks as well as Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries went out to confront Kornilov’s troops and persuade them to abandon their mission to Petrograd. The efforts of this united front of socialist activists were crowned with success. The troops halted their own trains from moving further towards Petrograd and General Kornilov was put under arrest. His mutiny had ended in fiasco.

Meanwhile popular discontent increased as conditions in the country worsened. Soldiers wanted peace, peasants wanted land, workers wanted job security and higher real wages. Not only the working class but also the large number of ‘middling’ people faced a winter of hunger. Shopkeepers, carriage-drivers and providers of various other services shared the fear that bread and potatoes might soon become unobtainable; and their small businesses were disrupted by the general economic chaos.¹⁹ Moreover, the urban cost of living rose sharply: the price index more than doubled between March and October.²⁰ The wage-rises negotiated after Nicholas II’s abdication did not keep pace with inflation. Unemployment, too, was becoming widespread; and there was no state welfare for those thrown out of work. All workers in factories, mines and other enterprises felt the adverse effects of a collapsing economy. They formed a united front against their employers.

Kerenski could not begin to satisfy these desires except if he withdrew from the war. And yet if he were indeed to withdraw from the war, he would be castigated by all parties — including the Bolsheviks — for betraying Russia’s vital interests. As it was, he was being subjected to Lenin’s wholly unfair accusation of plotting to hand over Petrograd to the Germans.²¹ Nor did Kerenski stand much chance of surviving in power once the elections to the Constituent Assembly were held. Again Lenin made charges of malpractice. Kerenski, he claimed, was deliberately delaying the elections. In fact a huge administrative task, especially in wartime, was entailed in the accurate compilation of voters’ rolls. Nevertheless Kerenski’s prospects were far from good once the process had been completed.

Already the Provisional Government was confronted by direct social disruption. Peasants in each village put aside their mutual rivalries. The wealthier among them joined with the poor against the gentry landlords. Their activity took the form of illegally using arable land, grabbing crops and equipment, cutting timber and grazing livestock. But already in March there were three cases of outright seizure of land owned by gentry. In July, 237 such cases were reported. Admittedly there were only 116 cases in October;²² but this was not a sign that the peasants were calming down. A truer index of their mood was their increasing willingness to attack landowners and burn their houses and farming property. Whereas there had been only five destructive raids of this sort in July, there were 144 in October.²³ After the harvest had been taken in, the peasantry was delivering a final warning to both the government and the landed gentry that obstruction of peasant aspirations would no longer be tolerated.

Simultaneously the slogan of ‘workers’ control’ gained in appeal to the working class. In most cases this meant that elective committees of workers claimed the right to monitor and regulate managerial decisions on finance, production and employment. In a few cases the committees completely removed their managers and foremen and took over the enterprises. Such a step was taken most often in Ukraine and the Urals, where owners had always been uncompromising towards the labour movement. Miners in the Don Basin, for example, went as far as taking their managers captive, releasing them only after Kerenski sent in army units. But even the less extreme versions of ‘workers’ control’ involved a massive interference with capitalist practices. In July it was in force in 378 enterprises. By October it had been spread to 573 and involved two fifths of the industrial working class.²⁴

The sailors and soldiers, too, were self-assertive. First they elected their committees in the garrisons, but quickly after the February Revolution committees were also set up by troops at the front. Commands by officers were subject to scrutiny and challenge with increasing intensity. The hierarchy of military command was no longer fully functional, especially after the Kornilov mutiny in August. Furthermore, troops caused a problem not only collectively but also as individuals. The combined effect of the unpopularity of the June offensive and the news that land was being seized in the villages induced tens of thousands of conscripts to desert. Peasants-in-uniform wanted their share of the redistributed property of the gentry. Leaping into railway carriages with their rifles over their shoulders, they added to the disorder of transport and public governance.²⁵

In trying to deal with such a crisis, the Provisional Government lacked the aura of legitimacy that a popular election might have conferred upon it. Ministers since February 1917 had perforce relied upon persuasion to control the populace. For the disbanding of the tsarist police limited Kerenski’s scope for repression. So, too, did the unwillingness of the army garrisons to give unstinted obedience to the Provisional Government’s orders.

Kerenski for some weeks after the Kornilov mutiny ruled by means of a temporary five-man Directory consisting of himself, the two armed service chiefs, the obscure Menshevik A. M. Nikitin and the recent Minister for Foreign Affairs M. I. Tereshchenko. But this was an embarrassing mode of rule for a government claiming to be democratic and Kerenski badly needed to widen the political base of the government. On 14 September he therefore agreed to the convocation of a ‘Democratic Conference’ of all parties and organizations to the left of the Kadets; and Kerenski himself agreed to address the opening session. But the Conference turned into a shambles. The Bolsheviks attended only in order to declare their disgust with Kerenski. Quite apart from their opposition, the Conference remained too divided to be able to supply a consensus of support for Kerenski.²⁶

Kerenski put on a show of his old confidence; he resolved to reassert governmental authority and started to send troops to acquire food supplies from the countryside by force. This stiffening of measures enabled him to persuade six Kadets into a Third Coalition on 27 September. Only seven out of the seventeen ministers were socialists, and anyway these socialists had policies hardly different from those of the liberals. The Provisional Government in its latest manifestation would neither offer radical social and economic reforms nor concentrate its diplomacy in quest of a peaceful end to the Great War.

The Democratic Conference proposed to lend a representative, consultative semblance to the Third Coalition by selecting a Provisional Council of the Russian Republic. This Council would include not only socialists but also liberals and would function as a quasi-parliamentary assembly until such time as the Constituent Assembly met. Formed on 14 October, it became known as the Pre-Parliament. To the Pre-Parliament’s frustration, however, Kerenski refused to limit his freedom of decision by making himself accountable to it. And the Pre-Parliament could not steel itself to stand up to him.²⁷ Kerenski could and did ignore it whenever he liked. The long-winded debates in the Pre-Parliament simply brought its main participating parties — Kadets, Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries — into deeper disrepute. Neither Kerenski nor the Pre-Parliament possessed the slightest popular respect.

Lenin, from his place of hiding in Helsinki, saw this disarray as a splendid opportunity for the Bolsheviks. Less words, more action! For Bolsheviks, the course of Russian politics since the February Revolution vindicated the party’s argument that two lines of development alone were possible: ‘bourgeois’ or ‘proletarian’. They declared that the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries had become agents of the bourgeoisie by dint of collaborating with liberal ministers and the magnates of capitalism.

By September Lenin was urging his party to seize power immediately (and he busily composed a treatise on The State and Revolution to justify his strategy). The Central Committee, convening in his absence, rejected his advice. Its members saw more clearly than their impatient leader that popular support even in Petrograd was insufficient for an uprising.²⁸ But the revulsion of society against the Provisional Government was growing sharply. First the factory-workshop committees and the trade unions and then, increasingly, the city soviets began to acquire Bolshevik-led leaderships. In Kronstadt the soviet was the local government in all but name, and the Volga city of Tsaritsyn declared its independence from the rest of Russia in midsummer. By 31 August the Petrograd Soviet was voting for the Bolshevik party’s resolutions. The Moscow Soviet followed suit a few days later. Through September and October the urban soviets of northern, central and south-eastern Russia went over to the Bolsheviks.

Disguised as a Lutheran Pastor, Lenin hastened back to Petrograd. On 10 October 1917 he cajoled his Central Committee colleagues into ratifying the policy of a rapid seizure of power. The Central Committee met again on 16 October with representatives of other major Bolshevik bodies in attendance.²⁹ Lenin again got his way strategically. In the ensuing days Trotski and other colleagues amended his wishes on schedule, insisting that the projected uprising in Petrograd should be timed to coincide with the opening of the Second All-Russia Congress of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. Thus the uprising would appear not as a coup d’état by a single party but as a transfer of ‘all power to the soviets’.

Lenin was infuriated by the re-scheduling: he saw no need for the slightest delay. From his hiding-place in the capital’s outskirts, he bombarded his colleagues with arguments that unless a workers’ insurrection took place immediately, a right-wing military dictatorship would be installed. It is doubtful that he believed his own rhetoric; for no army general was as yet in any position to try to overthrow Kerenski and tame the soviets. Almost certainly Lenin guessed that the Kerenski cabinet was on the brink of collapse and that a broad socialist coalition would soon be formed. Such an outcome would not meet Lenin’s approval. Even if he were to be invited to join such an administration, his participation would unavoidably involve him in compromises on basic issues. Lenin did not fancy sharing power with Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries whom he accused of betraying the revolution.³⁰

Since July, Yuli Martov and the left-wing faction of the Menshevik party had been calling for the Kerenski cabinet to be replaced with an all-socialist coalition committed to radical social reform;³¹ and the left-wingers among the Socialist-Revolutionaries broke entirely with their party and formed a separate Party of Left Socialist-Revolutionaries in October. With these groups Lenin was willing to deal. But not with the rump of the Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary Parties: they had supped with the capitalist Devil and deserved to be thrust into outer darkness.

The situation favoured Lenin, and he knew it. For just a few months the workers and soldiers and peasants held Russia’s fate in their hands. The Imperial family was under house arrest. Courtiers, bishops and aristocrats were staying out of the public eye. The generals were still too shocked by the Kornilov fiasco to know what to do. The middle classes were sunk in despair. The shopkeepers and other elements in the urban lower middle class had a thorough dislike for the Provisional Government. Thus the main danger for the Bolsheviks was not ‘bourgeois counter-revolution’ but working-class apathy. Even Lenin’s supporters in the Bolshevik central leadership warned him that the Petrograd workers were far from likely to turn out to participate in an insurrection — and perhaps this was yet another reason for Lenin’s impatience. If not now, when?

Yet it was also a crucial advantage for Lenin that the political and administrative system was in an advanced condition of disintegration. Peasants in most villages across the former Russian Empire governed themselves. The military conscripts intimidated their officers. The workers, even if they were loath to take to the streets, wished to impose their control over the factories and mines. Kerenski had lost authority over all these great social groups.

While central power was breaking down in Petrograd, moreover, it had virtually collapsed in the rest of Russia. And in the non-Russian regions, local self-government was already a reality. The Finnish Sejm and the Ukrainian Rada disdained to obey the Provisional Government. In the Transcaucasus, Georgians and Armenians and Azeris created bodies to challenge the Special Transcaucasian Committee appointed by the cabinet in Petrograd.³² An alternative government existed in the soviets in practically every region, province, city and town of Russia. Soviets were not omnipotent organizations. But they were stronger than any of their institutional rivals. They had formal hierarchies stretching from Petrograd to the localities; they had personnel who wanted a clean break with the old regime of Nicholas II and the new regime of Lvov and Kerenski. They could also see no prospect of improvement in political, social and economic conditions until the Provisional Government was removed.

Kamenev and Zinoviev had been so appalled by Lenin’s démarche that they informed the press of his plan for a seizure of power; they contended that the sole possible result would be a civil war that would damage the interests of the working class. But Trotski, Sverdlov, Stalin and Dzierżyński — in Lenin’s continued absence — steadied the nerve of the Bolshevik central leadership as plans were laid for armed action. Trotski came into his own when co-ordinating the Military-Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet. This body’s influence over the capital’s garrison soldiers made it a perfect instrument to organize the armed measures for Kerenski’s removal. Garrison troops, Red Guards and Bolshevik party activists were being readied for revolution in Russia, Europe and the world.

4 The October Revolution (1917–1918)

The Provisional Government of Alexander Kerenski was overthrown in Petrograd on 25 October 1917. The Bolsheviks, operating through the Military-Revolutionary Committee of the City Soviet, seized power in a series of decisive actions. The post and telegraph offices and the railway stations were taken and the army garrisons were put under rebel control. By the end of the day the Winter Palace had fallen to the insurgents. On Lenin’s proposal, the Second Congress of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies ratified the transfer of authority to the soviets. A government led by him was quickly formed. He called for an immediate end to the Great War and for working people across Europe to establish their own socialist administrations. Fundamental reforms were promulgated in Russia. Land was to be transferred to the peasants; workers’ control was to be imposed in the factories; the right of national self-determination, including secession, was to be accorded to the non-Russian peoples. Opponents of the seizure of power were threatened with ruthless retaliation.

Bolsheviks pinpointed capitalism as the cause of the Great War and predicted further global struggles until such time as the capitalist order was brought to an end. According to this prognosis, capitalism predestined workers in general to political and economic misery also in peacetime.

Such thoughts did not originate with Bolshevism; on the contrary, they had been shared by fellow socialist parties in the Russian Empire, including the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, and in the rest of Europe. The Socialist International had repeatedly expressed this consensus at its Congresses before 1914. Each of its parties thought it was time for the old world to be swept away and for socialism to be inaugurated. The awesome consequences of the Great War confirmed them in their belief. Other ideas, too, were held by Bolsheviks which were socialist commonplaces. For example, most of the world’s socialists subscribed strongly to the notion that central economic planning was crucial to the creation of a fairer society. They contended that social utility rather than private profit ought to guide decisions in public affairs. Not only far-left socialists but also the German Social-Democratic Party and the British Labour Party took such a standpoint.

It was the specific proposals of the Bolshevik party for the new world order that caused revulsion among fellow socialists. Lenin advocated dictatorship, class-based discrimination and ideological imposition. The definition of socialism had always been disputed among socialists, but nearly all of them took it as axiomatic that socialism would involve universal-suffrage democracy. Lenin’s ideas were therefore at variance with basic aspects of conventional socialist thought.

The Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries drew attention to this, but their words were not always understood by socialists in the rest of Europe who did not yet have much information about Bolshevik attitudes. There persisted a hope in Western socialist parties that the divisions between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks might yet be overcome and that they might reunite to form a single party again. And so the mixture of contrast and similarity between Bolshevism and other variants of socialist thought baffled a large number of contemporary observers, and the confusion was made worse by the terminology. The Bolsheviks said they wanted to introduce socialism to Russia and to assist in the making of a ‘European socialist revolution’; but they also wanted to create something called communism. Did this mean that socialism and communism were one and the same thing?

Lenin had given a lengthy answer to the question in The State and Revolution, which he wrote in summer 1917 and which appeared in 1918. His contention was that the passage from capitalism to communism required an intermediate stage called the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. This dictatorship would inaugurate the construction of socialism. Mass political participation would be facilitated and an unprecedentedly high level of social and material welfare would be provided. Once the resistance of the former ruling classes had been broken, furthermore, the need for repressive agencies would disappear. Dictatorship would steadily become obsolete and the state would start to wither away. Then a further phase — communism — would begin. Society would be run according to the principle: from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. Under communism there would be no political or national oppression, no economic exploitation. Humanity would have reached its ultimate stage of development.¹

Most other socialists in Russia and elsewhere, including Marxists, forecast that Lenin’s ideas would lead not to a self-terminating dictatorship but to an extremely oppressive, perpetual dictatorship.² They were furious with Lenin not only out of horror at his ideas but also because he brought them too into disrepute in their own countries. Liberals, conservatives and the far right had no interest in the niceties of the polemics between Bolsheviks and other socialists. For them, Bolshevik policies were simply proof of the inherently oppressive orientation of socialism in general. ‘Bolshevism’ was a useful stick of propaganda with which to beat the socialist movements in their own countries.

In 1917, however, such discussions seemed very abstract; for few of Lenin’s critics gave him any chance of staying in power. Lenin himself could hardly believe his good fortune. Whenever things looked bleak, he convinced himself that his regime — like the Paris Commune of 1871 — would offer a paradigm for later generations of socialists to emulate. The Bolsheviks might be tossed out of power at any time. While governing the country, they ‘sat on their suitcases’ lest they suddenly had to flee into hiding. Surely the luck of the Bolsheviks would soon run out? The governments, diplomats and journalists of western and central Europe were less interested in events in Petrograd than in the shifting fortunes of their own respective armies. Information about the Bolsheviks was scanty, and it took months for Lenin to become a personage whose policies were known in any detail outside Russia.

For the events of 25 October had taken most people by surprise even in Petrograd. Most workers, shop-owners and civil servants went about their customary business. The trams ran; the streets were clear of trouble and there were no demonstrations. Shops had their usual customers. Newspapers appeared normally. It had been a quiet autumnal day and the weather was mild.

Only in the central districts had anything unusual been happening. The Military-Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet as well as the Red Guards, under Trotski’s guidance, were hard at work organizing the siege of the Winter Palace, where Kerenski and several of his ministers were trapped, and in securing the occupation of other key strategic points: the post and telegraph offices, the railway stations, and the garrisons. The battleship Aurora from the Baltic Sea fleet was brought up the river Neva to turn its guns towards the Winter Palace. Kerenski could see that he lacked the forces to save the Provisional Government. Exploiting the chaos, he got into an official limousine which was allowed through the ranks of the besiegers. Lenin had meanwhile come out of hiding. Taking a tram from the city’s outskirts, he arrived at Bolshevik headquarters at the Smolny Institute, where he harassed his party colleagues into intensifying efforts to take power before the Second Congress of Soviets opened later in the day

The reason for Lenin’s continuing impatience must surely have stemmed from his anticipation that the Bolsheviks would not have a clear majority at the Congress of Soviets — and indeed they gained only 300 out of 670 elected delegates.³ He could not drive his policies through the Congress without some compromise with other parties. It is true that many Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries had lately accepted that an exclusively socialist coalition, including the Bolsheviks, should be formed. But Lenin could think of nothing worse than the sharing of power with the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries. The Congress of Soviets might foist a coalition upon him. His counter-measure was to get the Military-Revolutionary Committee to grab power hours in advance of the Congress on the assumption that this would probably annoy the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries enough to dissuade them from joining a coalition with the Bolsheviks.

The ploy worked. As the Congress assembled in the Smolny Institute, the fug of cigarette smoke grew denser. Workers and soldiers sympathetic to the Bolsheviks filled the main hall. The appearance of Trotski and Lenin was greeted with a cheering roar. The Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries were disgusted, and denounced what they described as a Bolshevik party coup d’état. The Menshevik Yuli Martov declared that most of the Bolshevik delegates to the Congress had been elected on the understanding that a general socialist coalition would come to power, and his words were given a respectful hearing. Yet tempers ran high among other Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries present. In an act of stupendous folly, they stormed out of the hall.⁴

Their exodus meant that the Bolsheviks, who had the largest delegation, became the party with a clear-cut majority. Lenin and Trotski proceeded to form their own government. Trotski suggested that it should be called the Council of People’s Commissars (or, as it was in its Russian acronym, Sovnarkom). Thus he contrived to avoid the bourgeois connotations of words such as ‘ministers’ and ‘cabinets’. Lenin would not be Prime Minister or Premier, but merely Chairman, and Trotski would serve as People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs. The Second Congress of Soviets had not been abandoned by all the foes of the Bolsheviks: the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries had remained inside the Institute. Lenin and Trotski invited them to join Sovnarkom, but were turned down. The Left Socialist-Revolutionaries were waiting to see whether the Bolshevik-led administration would survive; and they, too, aspired to the establishment of a general socialist coalition.

Lenin and Trotski set their faces against such a coalition; but they were opposed by colleagues in the Bolshevik Central Committee who also wanted to negotiate with the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries to this end. Furthermore, the central executive body of the Railwaymen’s Union threatened to go on strike until a coalition of all socialist parties had been set up, and the political position of Lenin and Trotski was weakened further when news arrived that a Cossack contingent loyal to Kerenski was moving on Petrograd.

But things then swung back in favour of Lenin and Trotski. The Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries no more wished to sit in a government including Lenin and Trotski than Lenin and Trotski wanted them as colleagues. The negotiations broke down, and Lenin unperturbedly maintained an all-Bolshevik Sovnarkom. Three Bolsheviks resigned from Sovnarkom, thinking this would compel Lenin to back down.⁵ But to no avail. The rail strike petered out, and the Cossacks of General Krasnov were defeated by Sovnarkom’s soldiers on the Pulkovo Heights outside the capital. The Bolshevik leaders who had stood by Lenin were delighted. Victory, both military and political, was anticipated by Lenin and Trotski not only in Russia but also across Europe. Trotski as People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs expected simply to publish the secret wartime treaties of the Allies and then to ‘shut up shop’.⁶ For he thought that the Red revolutions abroad would end the need for international diplomacy altogether.

Trotski met the Allied diplomats, mainly with the intention of keeping the regime’s future options open. The burden of energy, however, fell elsewhere. Sovnarkom was the government of a state which was still coming into being. Its coercive powers were patchy in Petrograd, non-existent in the provinces. The Red Guards were ill-trained and not too well disciplined. The garrisons were as reluctant to fight other Russians as they had been to take on the Germans. Public announcements were the most effective weapons in Sovnarkom’s arsenal. On 25 October, Lenin wrote a proclamation justifying the ‘victorious uprising’ by reference to ‘the will of the huge majority of workers, soldiers and peasants’. His sketch of future measures included the bringing of ‘an immediate democratic peace to all the peoples’. In Russia the Constituent Assembly would be convoked. Food supplies would be secured for the towns and workers’ control over industrial establishments instituted. ‘Democratization of the army’ would be achieved. The lands of gentry, crown and church would be transferred ‘to the disposal of the peasant committees’.⁷

Two momentous documents were signed by Lenin on 26 October. The Decree on Peace made a plea to governments and to ‘all the warring peoples’ to bring about a ‘just, democratic peace’. There should be no annexations, no indemnities, no enclosure of small nationalities in larger states against their will. Lenin usually eschewed what he considered as moralistic language, but he now described the Great War as ‘the greatest crime against humanity’:⁸ probably he was trying to use terminology congruent with the terminology of President Woodrow Wilson. But above all he wanted to rally the hundreds of millions of Europe’s workers and soldiers to the banner of socialist revolution; he never doubted that, without revolutions, no worthwhile peace could be achieved.

The Decree on Land, edited and signed by him on the same day, summoned the peasants to undertake radical agrarian reform. Expropriation of estates was to take place without compensation of their owners. The land and equipment seized from gentry, crown and church was to ‘belong to the entire people’. Lenin stressed that ‘rank-and-file’ peasants should be allowed to keep their property intact. The appeal was therefore directed at the poor and the less-than-rich. This brief preamble was followed by clauses which had not been written by him but purloined from the Party of Socialist-Revolutionaries, which had collated 242 ‘instructions’ set out by peasant committees themselves in summer 1917. Lenin’s decree repeated them verbatim. Land was to become an ‘all-people’s legacy’; it could no longer be bought, sold, rented or mortgaged. Sovnarkom’s main stipulation was that the large estates should not be broken up but handed over to the state. Yet peasants were to decide most practicalities for themselves as the land passed into their hands.⁹

Other decrees briskly followed. The eight-hour day, which had been introduced under the Provisional Government, was confirmed on 29 October, and a code on workers’ control in factories and mines was issued on 14 November. This was not yet a comprehensive design for the transformation of the economy’s urban sector; and, while industry was at least mentioned in those early weeks of power, Lenin was slow to announce measures on commerce, finance and taxation. His main advice to the party’s supporters outside Petrograd was to ‘introduce the strictest control over production and account-keeping’ and to arrest those who attempted sabotage.¹⁰

Frequently Sovnarkom and the Bolshevik Central Committee declared that the new administration intended to facilitate mass political participation. A revolution for and by the people was anticipated. Workers, peasants, soldiers and sailors were to take direct action. ‘Soviet power’ was to be established on their own initiative. But Lenin’s will to summon the people to liberate themselves was accompanied by a determination to impose central state authority. On 26 October he had issued a Decree on the Press, which enabled him to close down any newspapers publishing materials inimical to the decisions of the Second Congress of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies.¹¹ Repressive measures were given emphasis. Lenin pointed out that the authorities lacked a special agency to deal with sabotage and counter-revolutionary activity; and on 7 December, Sovnarkom at his instigation formed the so-called Extraordinary Commission (or Cheka). Its task of eliminating opposition to the October Revolution was kept vague and extensive: no inhibition was to deter this forerunner of the dreaded NKVD and KGB.¹²

Nor did Lenin forget that the tsars had ruled not a nation-state but an empire. Following up his early announcement on national self-determination, he offered complete independence to Finland and confirmed the Provisional Government’s similar proposal for German-occupied Poland. This was done in the hope that Soviet revolutionary republics would quickly be established by the Finns and the Poles, leading to their voluntary reabsorption in the same multinational state as Russia. Lenin believed that eventually this state would cover the continent.¹³ His objective was the construction of a pan-European socialist state. Meanwhile Lenin and his colleague Iosif Stalin, People’s Commissar for Nationalities, aimed to retain the remainder of the former empire intact; and on 3 November they jointly published a Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia, confirming the abolition of all national and ethnic privileges and calling for the formation of a ‘voluntary and honourable union’. The right of secession was confirmed for the various nations involved.¹⁴

The Allied ambassadors in Petrograd did not know whether to laugh or cry. How could such upstarts pretend to a role in global politics? Was it not true that Lenin had spent more time in Swiss libraries than Russian factories? Was he not an impractical intellectual who would drown in a pool of practical difficulties once he actually wielded power? And were not his colleagues just as ineffectual?

It was true that not only the party’s central figures but also its provincial leaders were entirely inexperienced in government. Marx’s Das Kapital was their primer, which was studied by several of them in the prison cells of Nicholas II. Few of them had professional employment in private or governmental bodies before 1917.An oddity was Lev Krasin, a veteran Bolshevik still working for the Siemens Company at the time of the October Revolution. He was later to be appointed People’s Commissar for Foreign Trade. The rest of them were different. Most leading members of the party had spent their adult life on the run from the Okhrana. They had organized small revolutionary groups, issued proclamations and joined in strikes and demonstrations. They had studied and written socialist theory. Public life, out in the gaze of society, was a new experience for them as their days of political obscurity and untestable theorizing came to an end.

Lenin was the fastest at adjusting to the change. Until 1917 he had been an obscure Russian emigrant living mainly in Switzerland. Insofar as he had a reputation in Europe, it was not flattering; for he was known as a trouble-maker who had brought schism to the Marxists of the Russian Empire. Even many Bolsheviks were annoyed by him. His supporters were constantly asking him to spend less time on polemics and more time on making a real revolution, and alleged that his head was made giddy with all that Alpine air.

But, for Lenin, there were great questions at stake in almost any small matter. He had been involved in an unending line of controversies since becoming a revolutionary as a student at Kazan University. Born in the provincial town of Simbirsk in 1870, his real name was Vladimir Ulyanov. ‘Lenin’ was a pseudonym assumed years after he became a political activist. His background was a mixture of Jewish, German and Kalmyk as well as Russian elements. In the empire of the Romanovs this was not a unique combination. Nor was his father wholly unusual as a man of humble social origins in rising to the rank of province schools inspector (which automatically conferred hereditary nobility upon him and his heirs). This was a period of rapid educational expansion. The Ulyanovs were characteristic beneficiaries of the reforms which followed the Emancipation Edict.

The most extraordinary thing about the family, indeed, was the participation of Vladimir’s older brother Alexander in a conspiracy to assassinate Emperor Alexander III in 1887. The attempt failed, but Alexander Ulyanov was found out and hanged. A family which had dutifully made the best of the cultural opportunities available suddenly became subject to the police’s intense suspicion.

Lenin shared his brother’s rebelliousness, and was expelled from Kazan University as a student trouble-maker. He proceeded to take a first-class honours degree as an external student at St Petersburg University in 1891; but it was Marxism that enthralled him. He joined intellectual dissenters first in Samara and then in St Petersburg. The police caught him, and he was exiled to Siberia. There he wrote a book on the development of capitalism in Russia, which was published legally in 1899. He was released in 1900, and went into emigration in the following year. Young as he was, he had pretty definite notions about what his party — the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party — needed organizationally. What Is To Be Done?, printed in Russian in Munich in 1902, asserted the case for discipline, hierarchy and centralism; and it provoked the criticism that such a book owed more to the terrorists of Russian agrarian socialism than to conventional contemporary Marxism.

In 1903 the dispute over the booklet led the émigrés to set up separate factions, the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, in the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party. As Bolshevik leader he never lost the common touch. He personally met comrades arriving off the trains from Russia; and he volunteered to help fellow party member Nikolai Valentinov with his part-time job to trundle a customer’s belongings by handcart from one side of Geneva to another.¹⁵Doubtless he liked subordinate admirers better than rivals; all colleagues who rivalled his intellectual stature eventually walked out on him. Nor was his abrasiveness to everyone’s taste. An acquaintance likened him to ‘a schoolteacher from Småland about to lay into the priest with whom he had fallen out’.¹⁶ But when Lenin returned to Russia in the near-revolution of 1905–6, he showed that he could temper his fractiousness with tactical flexibility, even to the point of collaborating again with the Mensheviks.

The Okhrana’s offensive against the revolutionaries drove him back to Switzerland in 1907, and for the next decade he resumed his schismatic, doctrinaire ways. Acolytes like Lev Kamenev, Iosif Stalin and Grigori Zinoviev were attracted to him; but even Stalin called his disputations about epistemology in 1908–9 a storm in a tea-cup. Moreover, Lenin struggled against the foundation of a legal workers’ newspaper in St Petersburg. Spurning the chance to influence the labour movement in Russia on a daily basis, he preferred to engage in polemics in the journals of Marxist political and economic theory.¹⁷

His political prospects had not looked bright before the Great War. He could exert influence over Bolsheviks in face-to-face sessions, but his dominance evaporated whenever they returned to clandestine activity in Russia; and his call in 1914 for the military defeat of his native country lost him further support in his faction. But he held out for his opinions: ‘And so this is my fate. One campaign of struggle after another — against political idiocies, vulgarities, opportunism, etc.’¹⁸ The self-inflicted loneliness of his campaigns cultivated in him an inner strength which served him handsomely when the Romanov dynasty fell in February 1917. He was also older than any other leading Bolshevik, being aged forty-seven years while Central Committee members on average were eleven years younger.¹⁹ He was cleverer than all of them, including even Trotski. And while lacking any outward vanity, he was convinced that he was a man of destiny and that his tutelage of the Bolsheviks was essential for the inception of the socialist order.²⁰

His rise to prominence was effected with minimal technological resources. The central party newspaper Pravda carried no photographs and had a print-run that did not usually exceed 90,000.²¹Such few cinemas as Russia possessed had shown newsreels not of Lenin but of Alexander Kerenski. Nevertheless he adapted well to the open political environment. His ability to rouse a crowd was such that adversaries recorded that he could make the hairs stand on the back of their necks with excitement. He also contrived to identify himself with ordinary working people by giving up his Homburg in favour of a workman’s cap. Lenin and the Bolsheviks were becoming synonyms in the minds of those Russians who followed contemporary politics.²²

The mass media became freely available to him after the October Revolution. The Decree on Land had a large impact on opinion amidst the peasantry, and became popularly known as Lenin’s Decree.²³ But Bolsheviks were extremely small in number; and most of the very few village ‘soviets’ were really communes under a different name.²⁴ Moreover, the usual way for the peasantry to hear that the October Revolution had occurred in Petrograd was not through Pravda but from the accounts of soldiers who had left the Eastern front and the city garrison to return to their families and get a share of the land that was about to be redistributed. In the towns the profile of the Bolshevik party was much higher. Already having won majorities in dozens of urban soviets before the Provisional Government’s overthrow, Bolsheviks spread their rule across central, northern and south-eastern Russia; and their success was repeated in major industrial centres in the borderlands. Baku in Azerbaijan and Kharkov in Ukraine were notable examples.²⁵

For the most part, the Bolsheviks came to power locally by means of local resources. Sovnarkom sent auxiliary armed units to assist the transfer of authority in Moscow; but elsewhere this was typically unnecessary. In Ivanovo the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries put up little resistance, and the Bolsheviks celebrated Sovnarkom’s establishment with a rendition of the Internationale. In Saratov there was fighting, but it lasted less than a day. On assuming power, the Bolsheviks were joyful and expectant: ‘Our commune is the start of the worldwide commune. We as leaders take full responsibility and fear nothing.’²⁶

And yet the October Revolution was not yet secure. The political base of the Sovnarkom was exceedingly narrow: it did not include the Mensheviks, the Socialist-Revolutionaries or even the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries; it failed to embrace all Bolsheviks after the walk-out of the three People’s Commissars. Yet Lenin, backed by Trotski and Sverdlov, did not flinch. Indeed he seemed to grow in confidence as difficulties increased. The man was an irrepressible leader. Without compunction he gave unrestrained authority to the Extraordinary Commission and their chairman, Felix Dzierżyński. Initially Dzierżyński refrained from executing politicians hostile to Bolshevism; his victims were mainly fraudsters and other criminals. But the sword of the Revolution was being sharpened for arbitrary use at the regime’s demand. Lenin had no intention of casually losing the power he had won for his party.

Steadily the Bolshevik central leaders who had walked out on him and Trotski returned to their posts; and in mid-December the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, cheered by the Decree on Land and convinced that their political duty lay with the October Revolution, agreed to become partners of the Bolsheviks in Sovnarkom. As Left Socialist-Revolutionaries entered the People’s Commissariats, a two-party coalition was put in place.

Yet the question remained: what was to happen about the Constituent Assembly? Lenin had suggested to Sverdlov in the course of the October seizure of power in the capital that the elections should not go ahead.²⁷ But Bolshevik party propaganda had played heavily upon the necessity of a democratically-chosen government. Lenin himself had jibed that Kerenski would find endless pretexts to postpone the elections and that, under the Bolsheviks, the overwhelming majority of society would rally to their cause.²⁸ And so Lenin’s last-minute doubts about the Constituent Assembly were ignored. The final polling arrangements were made by November and were put to use in the first more or less free parliamentary elections in the country’s history. (They were to remain the only such elections in Russia until 1993.) To the horror of Sverdlov, who had dissuaded Lenin from banning the elections, the Bolsheviks gained only a quarter of the votes cast while the Socialist-Revolutionaries obtained thirty-seven per cent.²⁹

The Sovnarkom coalition reacted ruthlessly: if the people failed to perceive where their best interests lay, then they had to be protected against themselves. The Constituent Assembly met on 5 January 1918 in the Tauride Palace. The Socialist-Revolutionary Viktor Chernov made a ringing denunciation of Bolshevism and asserted his own party’s commitment to parliamentary democracy, peace and the transfer of land to the peasants. But he had more words than guns. The custodian of the building, the anarchist Zheleznyakov, abruptly announced: ‘The guard is tired!’ The deputies to the Assembly were told to leave and a demonstration held in support of the elections was fired upon by troops loyal to Sovnarkom. The doors of the Constituent Assembly were closed, never to be reopened.

The handful of garrison soldiers, Red Guards and off-duty sailors who applied this violence could crush opposition in the capital, but were less impressive elsewhere. Contingents were sent from Petrograd and Moscow to Ukraine where the local government, the Rada, refused to accept the writ of Sovnarkom. Tens of thousands of armed fighters reached Kiev. The struggle was scrappy, and it took until late January 1918 before Kiev was occupied by the Bolshevik-led forces.

All this was gleefully noted by the German and Austrian high commands. Negotiations were held at Brest-Litovsk, the town nearest the trenches of the Eastern front’s northern sector on 14 November, and a truce was soon agreed. The Soviet government expected this to produce an interlude for socialist revolutions to break out in central Europe. Confident that the ‘imperialist war’ was about to end, Lenin and his colleagues issued orders for the Russian armies to be demobilized. To a large extent they were merely giving retrospective sanction to desertions. Ludendorff and Hindenburg at any rate were delighted; for it was German policy to seek Russia’s dissolution as a military power by political means. Inadvertently the Bolsheviks had performed this function brilliantly. Now the Bolsheviks, too, had to pay a price: in December 1917 the German negotiators at Brest-Litovsk delivered an ultimatum to the effect that Sovnarkom should allow national self-determination to the borderlands and cease to claim sovereignty over them.

Around New Year 1918 Lenin asked his colleagues whether it was really possible to fight the Germans.³⁰ Trotski saw the deserted Russian trenches every time he travelled to and from Brest-Litovsk. A Russian army no longer existed to repel attack. In this situation, as Trotski contended, Sovnarkom could not fulfil its commitment to waging a ‘revolutionary war’. And yet Trotski also argued against signing a separate peace with the Central Powers, a peace that was intolerable not only to the Bolsheviks but also to all other Russian political parties. His recommendation was that Bolsheviks should drag out the negotiations, using them as an opportunity to issue calls to revolution which would be reported in Berlin as well as in Petrograd.

Despite his professional inexperience, Trotski proved a match for Richard von Kühlmann and Otto von Czernin who parleyed on behalf of the Central Powers. His tactic of ‘neither war nor peace’ was so bizarre in the world history of diplomacy that his interlocutors did not immediately know how to reply. But in January 1918 the Central Powers gave their ultimatum that, unless a separate peace was quickly signed on the Eastern front, Russia would be overrun. Lenin counselled Sovnarkom that the coalition had no choice but to accept the German terms, and that procrastination would provoke either an immediate invasion or a worsening of the terms of the ultimatum. All the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries rejected his advice. Successive meetings of the Bolshevik Central Committee, too, turned it down. As the ill-tempered deliberations proceeded, Trotski’s policy of neither war nor peace was temporarily adopted. But eventually a choice would have to be made between war and peace.

Lenin concentrated upon persuading fellow leading Bolsheviks. On 8 January he offered his ‘Theses on a Separate and Annexationist Peace’ to the party’s faction at the Third Congress of Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Cossacks’ Deputies. Only fifteen out of sixty-three listeners voted for him.³¹ But Lenin was fired up for the struggle. He secured Trotski’s private consent that he would support Lenin if and when it came to a straight choice between war and peace; and he tempted the vacillators with the thought that a peace on the Eastern front would enable the Bolsheviks to ‘strangle’ the Russian bourgeoisie and prepare better for an eventual revolutionary war in Europe.³²

Steadily Lenin gained ground in the Central Committee. Sverdlov, Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev backed him strongly, and Bukharin and the Left Communists, as they were becoming known, began to wilt in the heat of Lenin’s assault. At the Central Committee he circulated a questionnaire on contingency planning. Bukharin conceded that there were imaginable situations when he would not object in principle to the signature of a separate peace. Sverdlov’s Secretariat plied the local party committees with a version of the debate that was biased in Lenin’s favour. There was also a distinct lack of impartiality in the Secretariat’s arrangements for the selection of delegates to a Seventh Party Congress which would definitively decide between war and peace.³³ And as Lenin had warned, the Germans were not fooled by Trotski’s delaying tactics. On 18 February they advanced from Riga and took Dvinsk, only six hundred kilometres from Petrograd. That evening, at last, a shaken Central Committee adopted Lenin’s policy of bowing to the German terms.

The vote had gone seven to five for Lenin because Trotski had joined his side. But then Trotski had second thoughts and again voted against Lenin. Germany and Austria-Hungary, however, increased their demands. The Soviet government had previously been asked to relinquish claims of sovereignty over the area presently occupied by the German and Austrian armies. Now Lenin and his colleagues were required to forgo all Ukraine, Belorussia and the entire south Baltic region to the eastern edge of the Estonian lands. Sovnarkom would lose all the western borderlands.

Sverdlov took the news to the Central Committee on 23 February that the Germans were giving them until seven o’clock the next morning to announce compliance. Momentarily Stalin suggested that their bluff should be called. But Lenin furiously threatened to withdraw from Sovnarkom and campaign in the country for a separate peace: ‘These terms must be signed. If you do not sign them, you are signing the death warrant for Soviet power within three weeks!’³⁴ Trotski found a way to climb down by declaring a preference for revolutionary war but postulating that it could not be fought by a divided party. He therefore abstained in the vote in the Central Committee, and victory was handed to Lenin. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed on 3 March. Cannily Lenin, Russia’s pre-eminent advocate of a separate peace, declined to attend the official ceremony and entrusted this task instead to Central Committee member Grigori Sokolnikov.

Opinion in the rest of the party had also been moving in Lenin’s favour; and at the Party Congress, which lasted three days from 6 March, his arguments and Sverdlov’s organizational manipulations paid off: the delegates approved the signature of ‘the obscene peace’. But at a price. Disgusted Left Communists, with Bukharin at their head, resigned from both Sovnarkom and the Bolshevik Central Committee. The Left Socialist-Revolutionaries were no less horrified, and pulled their representatives out of Sovnarkom. Not even Lenin was totally confident that the separate peace with the Central Powers would hold. On 10 March the seat of government was moved from Petrograd to Moscow, which had not been the Russian capital for two centuries, just in case the German armies decided to occupy the entire Baltic region. Nor was it inconceivable that Moscow, too, might become a target for the Germans.

In fact it was in Germany’s interest to abide by the terms of the treaty so as to be able to concentrate her best military divisions on the Western front.³⁵ Ludendorff needed to finish off the war against Britain and France before the USA could bring her formidable military and industrial power in full on their side. Only then would Germany have the opportunity to turn on Russia. The Bolsheviks had to keep on hoping that socialist revolution would occur in Berlin before any such contingency might arise.

In the meantime Sovnarkom faced enormous difficulties. By the stroke of a pen Russia had been disjoined from Ukraine, Belorussia and the Baltic region. Half the grain, coal, iron and human population of the former Russian Empire was lost to the rulers in Petrograd and Moscow. There would have been an economic crisis even without the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. The harvest of summer 1917 was only thirteen per cent below the average for the half-decade before the Great War; but this was 13.3 million metric tons of grain short of the country’s requirements.³⁶ Ukraine, southern Russia and the Volga region usually enjoyed good enough harvests with which to feed themselves and sell the remainder in the rest of the Russian Empire. These three regions had a shortfall in 1917–18, and possessed no surplus to ‘export’ to other parts. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk made a bad situation worse.

In addition, such peasant households as had surplus stocks of wheat and rye continued to refuse to sell them. The state, which maintained its monopoly on the grain trade, tried to barter with them. But to little avail. The warehouses of agricultural equipment had been nearly emptied. Industrial output in general was tumbling. In 1918 the output of large and medium-sized factories fell to a third of what it had been in 1913.³⁷ The multiple difficulties with transport, with finance and investment and with the unavailability of raw materials continued. Enterprises closed down also because of the ‘class struggle’ advocated by the Bolsheviks. Owners retired from production and commerce. Inflation continued to shoot up. In January 1918 a military-style system was introduced on the railways so as to restore efficiency. The banks had been nationalized in the previous December and many large metallurgical and textile plants were state owned by the spring.³⁸

Even so, the decrees to assert control by government and by people were unable to restore the economy. The increased state ownership and regulation were, if anything, counter-productive to the restoration of the economy. The Bolshevik party was menaced by a gathering emergency of production, transportation and distribution which the Provisional Government had failed to resolve. Lenin had blamed all problems on ministerial incompetence and bourgeois greed and corruption. His own attempt to reconstruct the economy was proving to be even more ineffectual.

Within a couple of years the party’s opponents were to claim that Sovnarkom could have rectified the situation by boosting investment in consumer-oriented industrial output and by dismantling the state grain-trade monopoly. Yet they were not saying this in 1917–18.At the time there was a recognition that the difficulties were largely beyond the capacity of any government to resolve. All of them were adamantly committed to the prosecution of the war against the Central Powers. The necessity to arm, clothe and feed the armed forces was therefore paramount. A free market in grain would have wrecked the war effort. The Bolsheviks alone were willing, just about willing, to sign a separate peace with the Germans and Austrians. But they set their face determinedly against economic privatization. What the liberal administration of Prince Lvov had nationalized they were not going to restore to the conditions of an unregulated market.

For they were a far-left political party, and proud of their ideas and traditions: they renamed themselves as the ‘Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks)’ expressly in order to demarcate themselves from other types of socialism.³⁹ Ideological impatience infused their thinking. Lenin was more cautious than most Bolsheviks on industrial and agrarian policies, and yet he never seriously contemplated de-nationalization. If he had done, he would not have got far with his party. Victory in the Brest-Litovsk controversy had already stretched the party to breaking-point. Any further compromise with Bolshevik revolutionary principles would have caused an unmendable split. As it was, the Treaty threatened its own disaster. A country which already could not properly feed and arm itself had lost crucial regions of population and production. Could the October Revolution survive?

5 New World, Old World

Bolshevik leaders had assumed that people who supported them in 1917 would never turn against them and that the party’s popularity would trace an unwavering, upward line on the graph. In the Central Committee before the October Revolution, only Kamenev and Zinoviev had dissented from this naïve futurology — and their scepticism had incurred Lenin’s wrath. Certainly there were excuses for misjudging the potential backing for the party. The Bolsheviks had not yet got their message through to millions of fellow citizens, and it was not unreasonable for them to expect to reinforce their influence once their reforms and their propaganda had had their desired effect. Lenin and his associates could also point out that the Constituent Assembly results had underplayed the popularity of the Sovnarkom coalition because the candidate lists did not differentiate between the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Socialist-Revolutionaries.

Nor had it been senseless to anticipate socialist revolution in central and western Europe. Bread riots had led to upheaval in Russia in February 1917. There were already reports of urban discontent in Germany and Austria and disturbances had taken place in the Kiel naval garrison. The Bolsheviks were right to suspect that the governments of both the Central Powers and the Allies were censoring newspapers so as to hide the growth of anti-war sentiment.

When all due allowance is made, however, the Bolsheviks had not acquired a governmental mandate from the Constituent Assembly elections; and their popularity, which had been rising in the last months of 1917, declined drastically in 1918. It was also clear that most persons in the former Russian Empire who voted for the party had objectives very different from those of Lenin and Trotski. The Constituent Assembly polls had given eighty-five per cent of the vote to socialists of one kind or another.¹ But the Bolsheviks were a single socialist party whereas the working class wanted a coalition government of all socialist parties and not just the Bolsheviks or an alliance restricted to Bolsheviks and Left Socialist-Revolutionaries. Workers in general did not demand dictatorship, terror, censorship or the violent dispersal of the Constituent Assembly. Nor did most of the soldiers and peasants who sided with the Bolshevik party know about the intention to involve them in a ‘revolutionary war’ if revolutions failed to occur elsewhere.²

This discrepancy was not accidental. The public agenda of Bolshevism had not been characterized by frankness; and sympathizers with the Bolshevik party, including most rank-and-file party members, had little idea of the basic assumptions and principles of the Central Committee. Yet this was not the whole story. For the Central Committee, while fooling its party and its electoral supporters, also deluded itself that the October Revolution would be crowned with easily-won success. They believed that their contingency plan for revolutionary war was unlikely to need to be implemented. When they replaced ‘land nationalization’ as a policy with ‘land socialization’, they felt that the peasantry would eventually see that nationalization was in its basic interest.³

Also of importance was the need for the Bolshevik leaders to simplify their policies to render them comprehensible to their own party and to society. Open politics had been hobbled in the tsarist period, and the public issues most readily understood by ordinary men and women after the February Revolution were those which were of direct significance for their families, factories and localities. Whereas they immediately perceived the implications of the crises in Russian high politics over Milyukov’s telegram in April and the Kornilov mutiny in August, their grasp of the less sensational issues of war, politics and economics was less sure. Consequently it was vital for the Bolsheviks to concentrate on uncomplicated slogans and posters that would attract people to their party’s side.⁴ This was a difficult task; for the universal political euphoria at the downfall of the Romanov dynasty gave way to widespread apathy amidst the working class about the soviets and other mass organizations in subsequent months.

A further problem was that the Bolsheviks were not agreed among themselves. There had been a serious split in the Central Committee over the composition of the government in November 1917, and another in March 1918 over the question of war and peace. At a time when the party’s need was to indoctrinate society, it had yet to determine its own policies. Even Lenin was probing his way. Society, the Russian Communist Party and its central leaders were finding out about each other and about themselves.

The party’s difficulties were especially severe in the borderlands, where Lenin’s regime was regarded as illegitimate. Practically the entire vote for the Bolsheviks in the Constituent Assembly had come from Russian cities or from industrial cities outside Russia that had a large working class embracing a goodly proportion of ethnic Russians. Only in the Latvian and Estonian areas, where hatred of the Germans was greater than worry about Russians, did the Bolsheviks have success with a non-Russian electorate.⁵ In the Transcaucasus, the Mensheviks of Georgia got together with Armenian and Azeri politicians to form a Transcaucasian Commissariat. A Sejm, or parliament, was set up in February 1918. But already there were divisions, especially between the Armenians and Azeris; and an alliance between the Bolsheviks and Armenian nationalists in Baku led to a massacre of the Muslim Azeris. The Ottoman army intervened on the Azeri side in spring.⁶ By May 1918 three independent states had been set up: Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia. The communists had been ousted even from Baku, and the entire Transcaucasus was lost to them.

Lenin and Stalin, as they continued to deliberate on this, recognized that their ‘Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia’, issued on 3 November 1917, had gone unnoticed by most of the non-Russian population.⁷ Over the ensuing weeks they altered their public commitment to the goal of a unitary state, and Lenin on 5 December published a Manifesto to the Ukrainian People which expressed the idea that the future government of Russia and Ukraine should be based on federal principles. In his subsequent Declaration of the Rights of the Toiling and Exploited People, which he wrote for presentation to the Constituent Assembly, he generalized this expectation by calling for a ‘free union of nations as a federation of Soviet republics’.⁸ After dispersing the Constituent Assembly, he came to the Third Congress of Soviets in late January and proclaimed the formation of the Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic (RSFSR).⁹

The ‘Russian’ in the title was not Russkaya but Rossiiskaya. This was deliberate. The former had an ethnic dimension; the latter connoted the country which was inhabited by many nations of which the Russians were merely one, albeit the largest one. Lenin wanted to emphasize that all the peoples and territories of the former Russian Empire were being welcomed into the RSFSR on equal terms in a federal system. He was also indicating his acceptance — in marked contrast with Nicholas II — that there were areas of the old empire that were not ‘Russia’. Russians were not to enjoy any privileges under Soviet rule.

The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918 foreclosed the possibility to test this policy in the borderlands on Russia’s south-west, west and north-west. The Ukrainian, Belorussian, Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian provinces of the former Russian Empire joined Poland under German military control. A puppet government of ‘Hetman’ Pavlo Skoropadskyi was installed in Kiev. Communist party leaders, some of whom attempted to organize a partisan movement, were chased out of Ukraine. In each of the lands occupied by the Germans a balance was struck between the enforcement of Berlin’s wishes and the encouragement of local national sentiment. Political, administrative and economic ties were broken with Moscow and Petrograd, and the Russian Communist Party’s task of reincorporating the lost territory was made the harder. There were problems even in areas where neither the Central Powers nor the Allies were active. The Muslim peoples of central Asia, most of whom dwelt outside cities, had little communication with Russia; and within Russia, by the river Volga and in the southern Urals, the Tatars and Bashkirs had yet to be persuaded that Sovnarkom would not rule the country primarily for the benefit of the Russians.

By the middle of 1918 the triple effect of the October Revolution, the Constituent Assembly’s dispersal and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk had been to trap the Bolsheviks in a Russian enclave. This was infuriating for them. Apart from Bukharin, Russians were not the leading figures in the Central Committee: Trotski, Kamenev, Zinoviev and Sverdlov were Jews; Stalin was a Georgian, Dzierżyński a Pole; Lenin was only partly an ethnic Russian. They had seized power in Petrograd so as to remake the politics of all Europe, and at home they had intended to transform the Russian Empire into a multi-national socialist state of free and equal nations. This remained their dream. But until the Red Army could impose itself on the borderlands the dream would not come near to reality. The Bolsheviks’ efforts in the meantime would perforce be concentrated in an area inhabited predominantly by Russians.

But how would these efforts be organized? Like his communist leaders, Lenin asserted that socialism should be built not only through a strongly centralized state but also by dint of the initiative and enthusiasm of the ‘masses’. He liked to quote Goethe’s dictum: ‘Theory is grey but life is green.’ Yakov Sverdlov, the Central Committee Secretary, had two other reasons for encouraging local initiative: the lack of sufficient personnel and the paucity of information about conditions in the provinces. To a party activist he wrote: ‘You understand, comrade, that it is difficult to give you instructions any more concrete than “All Power to the Soviets!” ’ Sovnarkom decrees did not lay down a detailed legal framework. Law meant infinitely less to Lenin, a former lawyer, than the cause of the Revolution. Sovnarkom was offering only broad guidelines for action to workers, soldiers and peasants. The aim was to inform, energize, excite and activate ‘the masses’. It did not matter if mistakes were made. The only way to avoid a blunder was to avoid doing anything.

The effect of the Decree on Land was particularly cheering for the Bolshevik party. Many peasants had been diffident about seizing whole estates before the October Revolution. They wanted to have at least a semblance of governmental permission before so precipitate a step. Lenin’s words released them from their fears. The gentry’s houses and agricultural equipment were grabbed in a rising number of incidents and peasants shared them among themselves.¹⁰

Not every region experienced this commotion. In central Asia the old social structure was preserved and property was left with its owners. In Ukraine the proximity of the Eastern front had discouraged peasants from a hasty movement against landowners in case the Central Powers broke through and restored the old social order — and this fear was realized with the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. But elsewhere the peasantry sensed that their historic opportunity had arrived. There was solidarity among established households of each village. Where the peasant land commune existed, as in most parts of Russia and Ukraine, its practices were reinforced. In thirty-nine Russian provinces only four per cent of households stayed outside the communal framework. Kulaks were pulled back into it; many of them needed little persuasion since they, too, wanted a share of the land of the dispossessed gentry. The peasants in Russia’s central agricultural region gained control over an area a quarter larger than before 1917; and in Ukraine the area was bigger by three quarters.¹¹

Many a household divided itself into several households so as to increase its members’ claim to land. The unintended consequence was that sons had a say in communal affairs whereas previously the father would have spoken on their behalf. As young men were conscripted, furthermore, women began to thrust themselves forward when decisions were taken: gradually the revolutions in the villages were affecting rural relationships.¹² But the main feature was the peasantry’s wish to arrange its life without outside interference. Liberated from indebtedness to the landlord and from oppression by the land captains, peasants savoured their chance to realize their ancient aspirations.

Among the other beneficiaries of this transformation were the soldiers and sailors of Russian armed forces. Sovnarkom had authorized their demobilization in the winter of 1917–18. This gave post factum sanction to a mass flight from the trenches and garrisons that had been occurring since midsummer. Most of the conscripts were peasants who, with rifles slung over their shoulders, jumped on trains and horse-carts and returned to their native villages. Their arrival gave urgency to the process of land reform, especially in places where little had hitherto been known about the Bolsheviks and their Land Decree. Those military units which were not demobilized had much internal democracy. Election of officers was commonplace and soldiers’ committees supervised the activities of the structure of higher command. Many such units were supporters of the Bolsheviks in the Constituent Assembly elections and fought in the early campaigns to consolidate the October Revolution in Moscow and Ukraine.

They demanded and received good rations, disdaining discipline as a relic of the tsarist regime. Several units were little better than a rabble of boozy ne’er-do-wells who had no homes to return to. Those which were well led and had high morale were treasured by the Bolshevik party. The outstanding ones were typically non-Russian. Without the Latvian Riflemen the regime might well have collapsed; and Lenin was in no position to quibble when the Latvians insisted on consulting with each other before deciding whether to comply with his orders.

Workers, too, relished their new status. Palaces, mansions and large town houses were seized from the rich and turned into flats for indigent working-class families.¹³ The expropriations took place at the instigation of the local soviets or even the factory-workshop committees and trade union branches. The authorities also gave priority to their industrial labour-force in food supplies. A class-based rationing system was introduced. Furthermore, truculent behaviour by foremen vanished after the October Revolution. The chief concern of the working class was to avoid any closure of their enterprise. Most remaining owners of enterprises fled south determined to take their financial assets with them before Sovnarkom’s economic measures brought ruin upon them. But factory-workshop committees unlocked closed premises and sent telegrams informing Sovnarkom that they had ‘nationalized’ their factories and mines. The state was gaining enterprises at a faster rate than that approved by official policy.

The movement for ‘workers’ control’ continued. Factory-workshop committees in central and south-eastern Russia followed their counterparts in Petrograd in instituting a tight supervision of the management.¹⁴ Most committees contented themselves with the supervising of existing managers; but in some places the committees contravened the code on workers’ control, sacked the managers and took full charge. There was also a movement called Proletarian Culture (Proletkult) which sought to facilitate educational and cultural self-development by workers. Lenin often worried that both ‘workers’ control’ and Proletkult might prove difficult for the party to regulate. Already in 1918 he was seeking to limit the rights of the workers in their factories and in the 1920s he moved against Proletkult. Even so, the working class kept many gains made by it before and during the October Revolution.

These fundamental changes in politics and economics demoralized the middle and upper social classes. Only a few diehards tried to form counter-revolutionary associations: the Main Council of the Landowners’ Union still operated and some Imperial Army officers banded together to form a ‘Right Centre’.¹⁵ General Kornilov escaped from house arrest outside Petrograd. After several weeks of travel in disguise, he reached southern Russia, where he joined General Alekseev in calling for the formation of a Volunteer Army to bring about the overthrow of the Soviet government. Yet such persons were exceptional. Most industrialists, landlords and officers tried to avoid trouble while hoping for a victory for counter-revolutionary forces. Many went into hiding; others were so desperate that they hurriedly emigrated. They took boats across the Black Sea, trains to Finland and haycarts into Poland. Panic was setting in. About three million people fled the country in the first years after the October Revolution.¹⁶

Their exodus caused no regret among the Bolsheviks. The Constitution of the RSFSR, introduced in July 1918, defined the state unequivocally as ‘a dictatorship of the urban and rural proletariat and the poorest’. The right to vote was withdrawn from all citizens who hired labour in pursuit of profit, who derived their income from financial investments or who were engaged in private business. Quickly they became known as ‘the deprived ones’ (lishentsy). In the main, the discrimination against them was based upon economic criteria. The Constitution stressed that this ‘republic of soviets of workers’, soldiers’ and peasants’ deputies’ had been established so as to effect the ‘transition’ to a socialist society. There was a formal specification that ‘he who does not work shall not eat’. Other disenfranchised groups included any surviving members of the Romanov dynasty, former members of the Okhrana and the clergy of all denominations.¹⁷ Lenin wanted it to be clearly understood that the RSFSR was going to be a class dictatorship.

Nevertheless there was less of a transformation than at first met the eye; this revolutionary society remained a highly traditional one in many ways. Several workers who had helped to take the Winter Palace on 25 October 1917 had simultaneously helped themselves to the bottles of the Romanov cellars. (Their carousing gave new meaning to calls for a replenishment of the revolutionary spirit.) Vandalism and thuggishness were not uncommon in other places. Traditional working-class behaviour was prominent, warts and all. Sensing that the usual constraints on them had been removed, factory labourers, horsecab-drivers and domestic servants behaved everywhere in a fashion that had once been confined to the poor districts of the towns and cities. Bolsheviks and Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, who had begun by admiring such displays of belligerence, began to understand the negative implications.

At any rate the fact that most workers had voted for socialist parties in elections to the soviets and the Constituent Assembly did not signify that they themselves were committed socialists. After the October Revolution they consulted their sectional interests to an even greater extent than before. Their collectivism was expressed in a factory work-force deciding how to improve its particular conditions without a thought for the ‘general proletarian cause’. Warehouse stocks were ransacked for items which could be put on sale by workers in groups or as individuals. A conscientious attitude to work in the factories and mines had never been a notable virtue of the unskilled and semi-skilled sections of the Russian working class, and the reports of slackness were plentiful. Such a phenomenon was understandable in circumstances of urban economic collapse. Workers were unable to rely on the state for their welfare and looked after themselves as best they could.

Many, too, fell back on to the safety net of the countryside. They were returning to their native villages to find food, to obtain a share of the expropriated land or to sell industrial products. Their customary connections with the rural life were being reinforced.

This same rural life was in vital ways resistant to the kind of revolution desired by the communists: the Russian village organized itself along centuries-old peasant precepts. Peasants were fair, or could be made to be fair, in their dealings with other peasants so long as they belonged to the same village. But rivalries between villages were often violent; and the elders of a given commune seldom agreed to any land passing into the hands of ‘outsiders’ or even of agricultural wage-labourers who had worked for years within the village.¹⁸ Furthermore, the peasantry maintained its own ancient order. There was no lightening of the harsh punishment of infringers of tradition. The peasants wanted a revolution that complied with their interests: they wanted their land and their commune; they desired to regulate their affairs without urban interference.

The peasantry already had grounds for resenting Sovnarkom on this score. The February 1918 Decree on the Separation of Church from State had disturbed the Russian Orthodox believers, and they and the various Christian sects were annoyed by the atheistic propaganda emitted from Moscow. At a more materialist level, peasants were also irritated at not being offered a good price for their agricultural produce. Their pleasure in the Decree on Land did not induce them to show gratitude by parting willingly with grain unless they received a decent payment. Each household’s pursuance of its narrow financial interests cast a blight over the working of the entire economy. The food-supplies crisis would become steadily more acute until the peasantry’s attitude could somehow be overcome.

Furthermore, the more or less egalitarian redistribution of land did not bring about an agrarian revolution that might have boosted production. The salient change was social rather than economic. This was the process known as ‘middle-peasantization’. As landholdings were equalized, so the number of peasant households classifiable as rich and poor was reduced. The middling category of peasants (serednyaki) — vaguely-defined though the category remains — constituted the vast bulk of the peasantry in the Russian provinces.¹⁹ This shift in land tenure, however, was not usually accompanied by a sharing of implements and livestock so that peasants who lacked either a plough or a cow were consequently reduced to renting out their additional patches of soil to a richer household which already had the wherewithal. There was little sign of rapid progress to a more sophisticated agriculture for Russia. Apart from the expropriation of the gentry, the rural sector of the economy survived substantially unaltered from before the Great War.

To most communists this appeared as a reason to redouble their revolutionary endeavour. Such problems as existed, they imagined, were outweighed by the solutions already being realized. Fervour had to be given further stimulation. Workers, soldiers and peasants needed to be mobilized by Russian Communist Party activists: the message of socialist reconstruction had to be relayed to all corners of the country so that Bolshevism might be understood by everyone.

One of the obstacles was technical. Communication by post and telegraph between cities was woeful; and even when metropolitan newspapers reached the provinces it was not unknown for people to use their pages not for their information but as cigarette-wrappers. Moreover, the villages were virtually cut off from the rest of the country save for the visits made by workers and soldiers (who anyway tended not to return to the cities). The structures of administration were falling apart. Policies enunciated by Sovnarkom were not enforced by the lower soviets if local Bolsheviks objected. Trade unions and factory-workshop committees in the localities snubbed their own supreme bodies. Inside the party the lack of respect for hierarchy was just as remarkable: the Central Committee was asked for assistance, but usually on the terms acceptable to the regional and city party committees.²⁰ The country lacked all system of order.

The problem was not merely administrative but also political: Bolsheviks were in dispute about the nature of their party’s project for revolutionary transformation. Disagreements erupted about matters that had received little attention before October 1917 when the party had been preoccupied with the seizing of power. It was chiefly the pace of change that was controversial. About basic objectives there was consensus; Bolsheviks agreed that the next epoch in politics and economics around the world would involve the following elements: the dictatorship of the proletariat; the state’s ownership and direction of the entire economy; the gathering together of society into large organizational units; and the dissemination of Marxism. At the centre Lenin urged a cautious pace of industrial nationalization and agricultural collectivization whereas Bukharin advocated the more or less immediate implementation of such objectives.²¹

The friction between Lenin and Bukharin seemed of little significance to most citizens. For although Lenin was a moderate in internal debates among Bolsheviks on the economy, he was an extremist by the standards of the other Russian political parties. Lenin, no less than Bukharin, preached class war against the bourgeoisie; and, for that matter, Lenin was the hard Old Man of Bolshevism on political questions: it was he who had invented the Cheka and destroyed the Constituent Assembly. Consequently it was the common immoderacy of the party that impressed most people.

The communist party therefore had to engage in a propaganda campaign to win supporters and to keep those it already had. Newspaper articles and speeches at factory gates had helped to prepare for the seizure of power. Something more substantial was needed to consolidate the regime. Plans were laid to establish a central party school, whose students would supplement the handful of thousands of activists who had belonged to the communist party before the February Revolution of 1917.²² Discussions were also held about the contents of the new party programme. Yet the communist leaders had not learned how to dispense with Marxist jargon. When the final version was settled in 1919, the language would have foxed all except intellectuals already acquainted with the works of Marx, Engels and Lenin.²³ Neither the school nor the programme solved the questions of mass communication.

The Bolshevik central leadership sought to improve the situation in various ways. Posters portraying the entire Central Committee were commissioned. Statues were erected to the heroes of Bolshevism, including Marx and Engels (and even rebels from ancient Rome such as Brutus and Spartacus).²⁴ Busts of Lenin started to be produced, and his colleague Zinoviev wrote the first biography of him in 1918.²⁵ The leadership appreciated, too, the potential of cinema. A short film was made of Lenin showing him shyly pottering around the grounds of the Kremlin with his personal assistant V. D. Bonch-Bruevich. Lenin also agreed to make a gramophone recording of some of his speeches. Few cinemas were in fact operating any longer; but propaganda was also conducted by so-called agit-trains and even agit-steamships. These were vehicles painted with rousing pictures and slogans and occupied by some of the party’s finest orators, who gave ‘agitational’ speeches to the crowds that gathered at each stop on the journey.

The party aimed to monopolize public debate and shut down all Kadet and many Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary newspapers; and the freedom of these parties to campaign openly for their policies was wrecked by the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly as well as by the overruling of elections to the soviets that did not yield a communist party majority.²⁶ Nevertheless the battle of ideas was not entirely ended. The Bolsheviks had secured privileged conditions to engage its adversaries in polemics, resorting to force whenever it wished, but the clandestine groups of the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries continued to operate among the workers and agitate for the replacement of the communists in power.

The communist party had to compete, too, against its coalition partners in 1917–18. The Left Socialist-Revolutionaries largely succeeded in prohibiting the use of force to acquire peasant-owned grain stocks even though several towns were on the verge of famine; they also issued denunciations of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Unlike the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, moreover, they managed to keep their printing presses running even after the party formally withdrew from the governmental coalition in March 1918.²⁷ The Orthodox Church, too, confronted the communists. Tikhon, the Moscow bishop, had been elected Patriarch in November 1917. There had been no Patriarch since 1700; and when the Decree on the Separation of Church from State forbade the teaching of religion in schools and disbarred the Church from owning property, Tikhon anathematized those who propounded atheism.²⁸ The Church relayed this message through its priests to every parish in the country.

Force gave the communists an unrivalled advantage in countering the anti-Bolshevik current of opinion. But force by itself was not sufficient. The enlistment of help from the intelligentsia was an urgent objective for the Bolsheviks. The problem was that most poets, painters, musicians and educators were not sympathetic to Bolshevism. The People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment, led by Anatoli Lunacharski, made efforts to attract them into its activities. It was axiomatic for the Bolsheviks that ‘modern communism’ was constructible only when the foundations of a highly educated and industrialized society had been laid. The ‘proletarian dictatorship’ and the ‘nationalization of the means of production’ were two vital means of achieving the party’s ends. A third was ‘cultural revolution’.

The teachers behaved more or less as the communists wanted. They had to co-operate with Sovnarkom if they wanted to be paid and obtain food rations; and in any case they shared the party’s zeal for universal literacy and numeracy. But artistic intellectuals were a matter of greater concern. They had caused perennial difficulties for the tsars by their commentaries upon political life and had acted as a collective conscience for the Russian nation; and the Bolshevik party worried lest they might start again to fulfil this role in the Soviet state. Official policy towards artists and writers was therefore double sided. On the one hand, intellectuals were subjected to the threat of censorship embodied in the Decree on the Press; on the other, the party appealed to them to lend their support to the revolutionary regime — and material benefits were offered to those willing to comply.

Some responded positively. The operatic bass Fëdr Shalyapin sang his repertoire to packed theatres at cheap seat-prices. The Jewish painter Marc Chagall was given a large studio in Vitebsk where he taught workers to paint. Even the poet Sergei Yesenin believed the best of the Russian Communist Party, declaring that the intelligentsia was like ‘a bird in a cage, fluttering desperately to avoid a calloused, gentle hand that wanted only to take it out and let it fly free’.²⁹ It would be hard to imagine a statement of more naïve trust in the party’s tolerance. Yesenin’s friend and fellow poet Alexander Blok harboured no such illusions; but even Blok felt no hostility to the October Revolution as such. His great poem, The Twelve, caught the chaotic spirit of the times through the image of a dozen ill-disciplined revolutionaries tramping the streets of Petrograd, talking about politics and sex and engaging in occasional acts of thuggery, and Blok was caught between admiration and repulsion for them.

Most intellectuals in the arts and scholarship were more hostile even than Blok to the Bolsheviks and saw the Decree on the Press as a preliminary step towards a comprehensive cultural clampdown. But there were few heroes amidst the intelligentsia. The times precluded the composition of lengthy works castigating Bolshevism: novels are not written in revolutions. Material circumstances, too, had an influence. Intellectuals could not live by ideas alone. Most of them were worse off than workers, who were given larger food rations by Sovnarkom. Increasingly the official authorities tried to suborn the intelligentsia by giving bread and money in return for newspaper articles, posters and revolutionary hymns. Hunger, more than direct censorship, pulled the intellectuals into political line.³⁰ And so a tacit truce was coming into effect. The regime obtained the educative tracts it desired while the intellectuals waited to see what would happen next.

The intelligentsia of the arts, science and scholarship was not alone in being courted by the Bolsheviks. Also indispensable to the maintenance of communist rule was the expertise of engineers, managers and administrators. The dictatorship of the proletariat, as Lenin continued to emphasize, could not dispense with ‘bourgeois’ specialists until a generation of working-class socialist specialists had been trained to replace them.³¹

More than that: Lenin suggested that Russian industry was so backward that its small and medium-size enterprises should be exempted from nationalization and aggregated into large capitalist syndicates responsible for each great sector of industry, syndicates which would introduce up-to-date technology and operational efficiency. Capitalism still had a role to play in the country’s economic development; socialism could not instantly be created. But the Soviet authorities would be able to direct this process for the benefit of socialism since they already owned the banks and large factories and controlled commerce at home and abroad.³² Sovnarkom would preside over a mixed economy wherein the dominant influence would be exerted by socialist institutions and policies. Capitalism, once it had ceased to be useful, would be eradicated.

Lenin’s term for this particular type of mixed economy was ‘state capitalism’, and in April 1918 he encouraged the iron and steel magnate V. P. Meshcherski to submit a project for joint ownership between the government and Meshcherski’s fellow entrepreneurs.³³ This pro-capitalist initiative caused an outcry on the Bolshevik party’s Left. Brest-Litovsk had been one doctrinal concession too many for them, and Lenin lacked the political authority to insist on accepting Meshcherski’s project. It is anyway open to query whether Lenin and Meshcherski could have worked together for very long to mutual advantage. Lenin hated the bourgeoisie, depriving it of civic rights after the October Revolution. When it looked as if the Germans were going to overrun Petrograd in January, he had recommended the shooting on the spot of the party’s class enemies.³⁴ Meshcherski was a rare industrialist who briefly considered political cohabitation with Lenin to be feasible.

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-Russians 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 military power in the western borderlands of the former Russian Empire, and were invited by Lenin to help the Bolsheviks in northern Russia (even though, 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, purportedly to defend Allied military equipment on Russian soil. Other threats, too, were realized. 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. Having carried out this distasteful errand, he instructed the Latvian Riflemen to arrest the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries. Their preliminary duty was to liberate Dzierżyński from the hands of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries who had taken him hostage.⁶ 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.

His brilliance had been proved before 1918. What took everyone aback was his organizational capacity and ruthlessness as he transformed the Red Army into a fighting force. He ordered deserters to be shot on the spot, and did not give a damn if some of them were communist party activists; and in this fashion he endeared himself to Imperial Army officers whom he encouraged to join the Reds. He sped from unit to unit, rousing the troops with his revolutionary zeal. The hauteur of spirit which made him so annoying to his rival politicians was an asset in situations where hierarchical respect was crucial. His flair, too, paid dividends. He organized a competition to design a Red Army cap and tunic; he had his own railway carriage equipped with its own map room and printing press. He also had an eye for young talent, bringing on his protégés without regard for the length of time they had belonged to the Bolshevik party.

The Red Army’s first task was to retake Kazan. Lenin still suspected Trotski of being weak minded, and wrote urging him not to worry if historic buildings were damaged. Trotski needed no urging. On 10 September the city was recaptured for the communists. Trotski was the hero of the hour. Lenin was delighted, and turned his attention to Red Army commanders whom he suspected of reluctance to press home their advantage. From Moscow he sent telegrams emphasizing the need to clear the Volga region of the Komuch forces.⁸

The Red Army overran Komuch’s base in Samara on 7 October, and the Czechoslovak Legion retreated to the Urals and then to mid-Siberia before regrouping under the command of Admiral Kolchak, who initially recognized Komuch as Russia’s legitimate government. His loyalty lasted only a few days. On 17 November Kolchak’s officers organized a coup against the Socialist-Revolutionary administration, arresting several ministers. Kolchak was proclaimed ‘Supreme Ruler’ and the Party of Socialist-Revolutionaries never again played a leading role upon the Russian national stage. Kolchak’s blood was up. He moved westwards from Omsk into the Urals, capturing the provincial centre of Perm in late December. The Red Army, the soviets and the party crumbled in his path. The Reds briefly counter-attacked and succeeded in taking Ufa, to the south of Perm; but Kolchak’s central group of forces were not deflected from their drive on Moscow.

The last months of 1918 were momentous on the Western front in the Great War. The Allies had seen off the German summer offensive in France, and military disarray ensued for the Central Powers. On 9 November, Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated. The German army had been defeated; and, for the Russian Communist Party, this meant that the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk could be disregarded as obsolete. First and foremost, Lenin sought links with German far-left socialists and gave encouragement to the formation of a German Communist Party. Revolutionary opportunities beckoned. Within days of the German military defeat, Red forces were aiding local Bolsheviks to set up Soviet republics in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Ukraine.

In Russia, violence intensified not only on the war fronts but also in civilian politics as Lenin widened the Cheka’s scope to suppress rival political parties. The Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks were excluded from the soviets in June 1918 on the grounds of being associated with ‘counter-revolutionary’ organizations, and the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries were arrested in large numbers. Many Kadets were already in prison. Lenin, Trotski and Dzierżyński believed that over-killing was better than running the risk of being overthrown. And so, as the anti-Bolshevik forces approached the Urals in the summer, the communist central leadership considered what to do with the Romanovs, who had been held in Yekaterinburg for some months. They opted to murder not only the former Emperor but also his entire family, including his son and daughters. On 17 July the deed was done. Lenin and Sverdlov claimed that the responsibility lay with the Bolsheviks of the Urals region, but the circumstantial evidence strongly points to the Central Committee having inspired the decision.⁹

On 30 August Lenin himself got it literally in the neck. As he addressed a meeting of workers at the Mikhelson Factory in Moscow, shots were fired at him. His chauffeur Stepan Gil bundled him into the official limousine and drove him away. A woman standing nearby, Fanya Kaplan, was arrested. It is doubtful that she carried out the shooting since she was almost blind;¹⁰ but she was a sympathizer with the Socialist-Revolutionaries and may well have been involved in the plot in some form or other. Be that as it may, she was executed as the principal malefactor while Lenin convalesced at the government’s new sanatorium at the Gorki estate, thirty-five kilometres from the capital.

The attempt on Lenin’s life was answered with the promulgation of a Red Terror. In some cities, prisoners were shot out of hand, including 1300 prisoners in Petrograd alone. Fire would be met by fire: Dzierżyński’s Cheka had previously killed on an informal basis and not very often; now their executions became a general phenomenon. Lenin, as he recovered from his wounds, wrote the booklet Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade K. Kautsky, in which he advocated dictatorship and terror.¹¹ His confidential telegram to Bolshevik leaders in Penza on 11 August had contained the instruction: ‘Hang no fewer than a hundred well-known kulaks, rich-bags and blood-suckers (and make sure that the hanging takes place in full view of the people).’¹² Another such telegram went to Petrograd in October 1919 at the time of an offensive by General Yudenich: ‘If the attack is begun, is it impossible to mobilize another 20,000 Petrograd workers plus 10,000 workers of the bourgeoisie, set up cannons behind them, shoot a few hundred of them and obtain a real mass impact upon Yudenich?’¹³

Terror was to be based on the criterion of class. Martyn Latsis, a Cheka functionary, was in favour of exterminating the entire middle class; and even Lenin made remarks to this effect.¹⁴ The purpose was to terrify all hostile social groups. Lenin intended that even the regime’s supporters should be intimidated. His recommendation to the Penza communists had made this explicit: ‘Do it so that for hundreds of kilometres around the people might see, might tremble!’¹⁵ According to official records, 12,733 prisoners were killed by the Cheka in 1918–20; but other estimates put the figure as high as 300,000.¹⁶ Other prisoners were held either in prison or in the concentration camps that were sanctioned by official decrees in September 1918 and April 1919.¹⁷

The premisses of Bolshevik policy were worked out quickly. The Food-Supplies Dictatorship which had been established in May 1918 was consolidated. The territory under Soviet control was divided into provinces and sub-divided into districts, and quotas of grain were assigned to each of them for delivery to the government. This system of apportionment (or razvërstka) was based upon the statistical evidence available, but Sovnarkom admitted that much guesswork was involved; and in practice the People’s Commissariat of Food Supplies grabbed grain wherever it could find it — and peasant households were often left starving. Sovnarkom had hoped to keep most peasants on its side. In June 1918 Lenin had decreed the establishment of ‘committees of the village poor’ (kombedy), which were meant to report the richer peasant families hoarding grain to the authorities;¹⁸ and in return they were to receive a hand-out from the requisitioned stocks. In reality the peasantry resented the entire scheme. Clashes with the urban squads were widespread and the kombedy fell into disrepute.

By December the kombedy had to be abolished by Lenin, who also strove to prevent his local party comrades from forcing peasants to give up the land they had taken since 1917 and enter collective farms.¹⁹ Upon re-conquering Ukraine, communist leaders accompanying the Red Army independently introduced a policy of collectivization which it took the Central Committee months to reverse.²⁰ Yet peasants were battered even by Lenin; for the state procurement of grain nearly quadrupled between the fiscal years 1917–18 and 1918–19.

And yet the increase was never enough to feed the towns after the Red Army’s requirements had been met. Less than a third of the urban diet in the Civil War came from state-provided rations: the rest had to be obtained from the so-called sack-men who travelled from the villages and sold produce on street corners in defiance of the Cheka.²¹ The black market was an integral part of the wartime economy. So, too, was the determination of the workers to eke out their rations by selling hand-made or even stolen goods on the side. Monetary wages became virtually worthless as the currency depreciated to 0.006 per cent of its pre-war value by 1921.²² Sheer physical survival was everyone’s aim. Industrial production formally recorded in the official statistics declined precipitately: large-scale enterprises in 1921 produced a fifth of the total recorded for 1913.²³ Key armaments plants and textile factories were the main enterprises kept going. Nevertheless the Reds took on the Whites primarily with inherited military supplies; and labour discipline in the factories and mines, despite the introduction of ever more severe legislation, was poor.

Meanwhile peasant households in the villages had to endure immense exactions of grain-stocks, conscripts and labour power. Villages tried to seal themselves off from the towns and hoard their stores. Wherever possible, peasants kept back their cereal and vegetable crops for trade with peasants from nearby villages or for wages in kind in return for work done by the many workers who were leaving the towns. The rural economic sector survived the Civil War in better shape than the urban sector;²⁴ but the reason for this was not the government’s competence but the peasantry’s ability to frustrate the government’s intentions.

The Bolsheviks recognized the patchiness of their military, political and economic control over town and countryside. Their leaders in Moscow and the provinces aspired to a centralized party, a centralized government, a centralized army, a centralized security force. Discipline, hierarchy and decisive action were their common aims. Lenin, Trotski, Dzierżyński, Sverdlov, Kamenev, Zinoviev and Bukharin were generally in agreement: their disputes affected mainly matters of secondary importance. For instance, Bukharin and Kamenev disliked the licence given to the Cheka to execute in secret.²⁵ Yet neither of them had a conscience about executions carried out after peremptory trials. What is more, no communist leader objected to the predominant economic orientation adopted since mid-1918. A strengthened campaign of industrial nationalization had occurred, and by 1919 all large factories and mines were owned by government. Grain requisitioning, too, was uncontroversial among the Bolsheviks. The Russian Communist Party became more militaristic in methods. Their members grew from about 300,000 in late 1917 to 625,000 in early 1921, and most of these Bolsheviks, old and new, fought in the Red Army.²⁶

The intensification of military hostilities softened the disagreements between Lenin and the Left Communists. It is not hard to see why. There was a surge of measures to bring the entire economy into the state’s control in the early months of the Civil War, and little reason remained for the Left Communists to cavil at Lenin’s industrial and agricultural policy. The utopian spirit prevailed throughout the communist party. Russia, according to the party’s leaders, was on the verge of creating a socialist society. At such a time the need for political authoritarianism was an article of faith. Soviets, trade unions and factory-workshop committees were instructed to reinforce centralism at the expense of electivity and consultation. Power in Moscow was the priority; and, as Sverdlov explained, this was unachievable unless a single institution controlled the state at each level. Everyone agreed that only the Russian Communist Party should and could fulfil this role. The party alone had the reliable personnel, the ideology and the esprit de corps.²⁷

There was no objection to this at the party’s lower levels. Provincial communist leaders had always been centralizers in theory, and their present sense of political isolation and military danger in their localities convinced them in practice that a fundamental overhaul of the political and administrative machinery was essential: they wanted greater central intervention because they needed the help. In the economy, too, their inclination had always been to nationalize. Local practicality reinforced this inclination. Every province which had serious shortfalls in supplies, whether in grain or coal or oil or machinery, sought Moscow’s assistance.²⁸ Lenin had always taken it for granted that the guidance of the party was vital to the October Revolution’s consolidation. Now he and his leading administrators, including Sverdlov, opted to give institutional form to this. The party was to become the supreme state institution in all but name.²⁹

There was a reshuffling of arrangements in the capital. The Central Committee could meet only infrequently because most of its members were political commissars on the fronts or in cities outside Moscow. From January 1919 two inner subcommittees were introduced, the Politburo and the Orgburo. The Politburo was to decide the great questions of politics, economics, war and international relations; the Orgburo, serviced by an expanded Secretariat, was to handle internal party administration. Sovnarkom’s authority was permanently reduced in favour of the Politburo, which was chaired by Lenin and immediately began to give rulings on everything from military strategy against Kolchak to prices of shoes and eggs in Saratov. The Politburo became an unofficial government cabinet.

Its founding members were Lenin, Trotski, Stalin, Kamenev and Nikolai Krestinski. On the whole, this was an effective body even though Trotski and Stalin usually had to be consulted by telegram. Lenin was good at coaxing his team to co-operate with each other. In the case of Trotski and Stalin he had his hands full. Stalin bridled at having to take instructions from Trotski as People’s Commissar for Military Affairs. They hated each other, but there was also a political edge to their clash. Stalin disliked the practice of employing Imperial Army officers, and he encouraged other Bolsheviks to complain about it. Thus was born a Military Opposition in the party. Trotski retorted that the Red Army could not function without experienced officers — and Lenin supported the policy at the Eighth Party Congress in March 1919.³⁰ Trotski was anyway not wholly traditional in his military preferences. He attached a political commissar to each officer; he also took the families of many officers hostage to ensure loyalty. Proud of his ruthlessness, he published a book in 1920, Terrorism and Communism, which eulogized mass terror.

Admiral Kolchak’s advance into the Urals in winter 1918–19 prevented Trotski from attending the Eighth Party Congress. Lenin had been so worried that he put out feelers to the Allies to see whether they might broker a halt to the Civil War if the communists forswore sovereignty over the parts of the country not presently occupied by the Reds.³¹ This was not defeatism but a temporary ploy. His thoughts were still directed at the ‘European socialist revolution’. A rising of far-left German socialists, the Spartakists, occurred in Berlin in January 1919; it was suppressed, but successful insurrections took place in March in Munich and Budapest. In the same month Lenin summoned communist and other far-left parties from around the world to the First Congress of the Communist International (or Comintern) in Moscow.

Kolchak was defeated by the Reds in April 1919. Perm was back in their hands in July, Omsk in November. Kolchak himself was captured and executed in the following year. The Volunteer Army in southern Russia which had been founded by the anti-Bolshevik Generals Alekseev and Kornilov was taken over by General Denikin, who moved his forces into Ukraine in summer. Denikin seized Kharkov in late June and Kiev and Odessa in August. Orël, only 350 kilometres from the capital, fell to him in mid-October. His strategy was expressed in a Moscow Directive ordering a rapid advance into central Russia. Yet the Red Army had been able to regroup after seeing off Kolchak. A devastating counter-attack against the Whites was organized which, by mid-December, resulted in the capture of Kiev and the re-establishment of a Ukrainian Soviet Republic. Luck was again on the side of the Reds; for it was only in October that General Yudenich had crossed the Estonian frontier in the direction of Petrograd. There was no co-ordination between him and Denikin. By the middle of November, Yudenich’s army was retreating in tatters to Estonia. The Civil War in Russia, including Siberia, and Ukraine had been won by the Reds.

This outcome of the war between the Reds and the Whites determined the result of most of the many armed conflicts elsewhere in the former Russian Empire. In the Transcaucasus, the Georgians contended against the Armenians; the Armenians also fought the Azeris. And each state in the region had internal strife. For example, battles and massacres occurred in Georgia between Georgians and Abkhazians.³² Consequently the armed struggle in the lands of the Romanov dynasty was never merely a ‘Russian’ Civil War. Indeed it was not just one Civil War at all: there were dozens of civil wars after 1917, wars in which the Red Army was able to intervene after its defeat of Kolchak, Denikin and Yudenich.

The communists aimed to make their task easier by offering various concessions to non-Russians. This policy had already been implemented in the RSFSR itself. Lenin established a People’s Commissariat for Nationalities (Narkomnats), headed by Stalin, to realize the official commitment to native-language schools and to cultural autonomy. Stalin and his subordinates did not merely allow non-Russians to exercise their freedom: they actively propelled them in this direction. Politically-compliant representatives of these nationalities were introduced to Narkomnats. Propaganda was prepared in each of their languages. Enquiries were put in hand to ascertain the boundaries of the territories inhabited mainly by these nationalities.³³ The Russian Communist Party bent over backwards to appease non-Russians — and towards the end of the Civil War the Russian Cossacks in the North Caucasus were ejected from their farms in favour of the local Chechens, whose land had been seized by the tsars and given to the Cossacks in the nineteenth century.

Both Lenin and Stalin, moreover, committed themselves to introducing a federal mode of rule once the Civil War had ended. From 1918, as proof of their intent, they started to set up internal ‘autonomous’ republics in the RSFSR wherever the Russians constituted a minority of the population. The first plan to set up a Tatar-Bashkir Republic within the RSFSR collapsed in some measure because Tatars and Bashkirs refused to collaborate with each other. There were also difficulties because ethnic Russians, too, lived among them, and the major towns had a Russian majority: not all Russians, by any means, felt that non-Russians should receive such apparent indulgence. Representations were made to Moscow that Russians were being done down. But the communists persisted and founded both a Tatar Republic and a Bashkir Republic.³⁴ As Soviet-occupied territory was expanded, so the number of autonomous republics rose.

Certain outlying regions had experienced years of independent statehood in the course of the Civil War, a statehood that in most cases was unprecedented for them. It would therefore have been difficult to incorporate them without further ado into the RSFSR. Ukrainians in particular did not take kindly to their resubjugation to Russian rule. Consequently Ukraine, once reoccupied by the Red Army, was proclaimed as a Soviet republic in its own right. This device was repeated elsewhere. By the time of the completed conquest of the Transcaucasus in March 1921, Soviet republics had been founded also in Belorussia, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia. And the RSFSR had bilateral relations with each of them.

This had much cartographic importance. In January 1918, when the creation of the RSFSR had been announced, the assumption had been that each piece of land conquered by Soviet forces would be incorporated in the RSFSR through a federal arrangement of some kind. But the pressing need of the Bolsheviks to win support in the non-Russian borderlands had led to the creation of several Soviet republics. The RSFSR was easily the largest, the most powerful and the most prestigious; but formally it was only one Soviet republic among all the others. Quite what constitutional settlement there would be at the end of the Civil War had not yet been decided. But one thing had been resolved: namely that there was a place called ‘Russia’ which would occupy a defined territory on the map, a territory which was considerably smaller than the former Russian Empire. The RSFSR was the state that governed this Russia and the vast majority of its population consisted of Russians.

Yet a distinct ethnically-based sense of Russian statehood could not develop. For the boundaries of the RSFSR were not set exclusively by considerations of national and ethnic geography. In particular, there was no Soviet republic in central Asia on the model of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. Instead the lands of the Kazakhs, Kirgiz, Tajiks and Uzbeks belonged to ‘the Turkestani Region’ and were included in the RSFSR. A so-called ‘Kirgiz (Kazakh) Republic’ was at last established in 1920, but only as an autonomous republic within the RSFSR.³⁵

At any rate, the fundamental reality was that the entire RSFSR was subjected to highly centralized authority and that both the RSFSR and all other Soviet republics were ruled by the Politburo. This was done in several ways. The most effective was the stipulation in the Party Rules drawn up in March 1919 that the communist organizations in the various Soviet republics were to be regarded merely as regional organizations of the Russian Communist Party.³⁶ Thus the central party bodies of the Ukrainian Bolsheviks in Kiev were strictly subordinated to the Central Committee in Moscow. Party centralism was to prevail. Lenin and his colleagues also drew up a confidential instruction to republican governments to the effect that republican people’s commissariats were to act as mere regional branches of Sovnarkom.³⁷ In addition, the new Soviet republics on the RSFSR’s borders were disallowed from having ties with any other republic except the RSFSR.³⁸ The aim was not to reinforce the RSFSR but to consolidate the Politburo’s capacity to control all the republics, including the RSFSR, from Moscow.

Yet enough concessions were being made to the sensitivities of non-Russians to make the Civil War easier for the Reds than for the Whites in the non-Russian regions. Jews in particular were terrified by the anti-Semitic mayhem perpetrated by the Whites.³⁹ Yet the advantage held by the Reds was helpful without being decisive. Invading troops misbehaved in all the armies. The Reds frequently committed butchery against religious leaders. Twenty-eight bishops and thousands of priests of the Russian Orthodox Church were killed; and the other Christian sects as well as Islam and Judaism were also subjected to a campaign of terror. Lenin’s policy was to introduce atheism by persuasion; but he, too, instigated the mass murder of clerics.⁴⁰ For most people, religious belief was entwined with their national or ethnic identity. The rampaging of the Red Army — and especially its cavalrymen — undid much of the good done for Sovnarkom’s cause by the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities.

Nevertheless the Whites had lost. The dispirited Denikin, as he retreated to Crimea, resigned his command to General Vrangel; Yudenich and his forces faded into inactivity. The Whites were in a hopeless position. Vrangel belatedly appreciated the damage done to their campaigns by their refusal to leave the peasants with the land taken by them since the October Revolution. Kolchak had given farms to landlords at the peasantry’s expense even in places where the landlords had not owned estates.⁴¹ By announcing their faith in ‘Russia One and Indivisible’, the Whites alienated those non-Russian nationalities who recognized the slogan as thinly disguised Russian imperialism. By hanging trade unionists, they made workers think twice before turning against the Russian Communist Party.

Kolchak, Denikin and Yudenich had rested their hopes in a military knock-out blow, and refused to fight a ‘political’ war. They were contemptuous of the Kadets who organized the civilian administration for them.⁴² Lip service was given by the White commanders to the ultimate goal of re-convoking a representative assembly of some kind; but their officers were hostile to this: their fundamental aim was a right-wing military dictatorship. Kolchak and Denikin came within striking range of Moscow; Yudenich reached the outskirts of Petrograd. It would therefore be wrong to dismiss their calculations out of hand. But they had the odds stacked against them. The Reds always held an area with a hugely greater availability of conscripts and military equipment;⁴³ they also were based at the heart of the country’s network of telegraph, railways and administration. The Reds had high morale and felt certain that they were making a new, better world and that science and social justice were on their side.

Indisputably, luck was with them. The Germans lost the Great War and stopped interfering in Russian affairs; the Allies donated money and guns to the Whites, but never seriously undertook the conquest of Russia themselves. The peoples of the West were in any event ill-disposed to fighting in eastern Europe once Germany had been defeated. Many Western socialists argued that the Bolshevik party should be given the chance to soften its dictatorial rule, and there were plenty of industrialists, especially in the United Kingdom, who wished to resume commercial links with Russia.⁴⁴ In January 1920 the Supreme Allied Council lifted the economic blockade on the RSFSR. The Whites were left to fend for themselves.

The Bolsheviks had won, and felt that their ideas had helped them to this end. They had become comfortable with the one-party, one-ideology state as the basis of their power. They legalized and reinforced arbitrary rule and had no intention of holding free elections. Dictatorship and terror appealed to them as modes of solving problems. They were convinced that Bolshevism was the sole authentic form of socialism. This internal party consensus contained its own disagreements. A group known as the Democratic Centralists sprang up in 1919 and contended that too few officials were taking too many decisions at both central and local levels of the party, that the party was run inefficiently, that the central party bodies too rarely consulted opinion in the local committees. Another Bolshevik group, the Workers’ Opposition, emerged in 1920; its complaint was that the aspirations of the factory labourers were being flouted. Workers’ Oppositionist leader Alexander Shlyapnikov urged that power should be shared among the party, the soviets and the trade unions and that ordinary workers and peasants should have influence over decisions on economic affairs.

Neither the Democratic Centralists nor the Workers’ Opposition wished to stop the harassment of the other political parties or to end the requisitioning of grain. Their factional disagreements with the Central Committee took second place in their minds to the need for loyalty to the party. While they may have thought of themselves as the conscience of the Revolution, they, too, had given up part of the more idealistic heritage of 1917. At any rate their factions were numerically tiny: they could not hope to beat the Central Committee for votes at the yearly Party Congresses.

A military-style approach to party organization and to politics in general had become customary in the Civil War. Orders replaced consultation. Having served in the Red Army, most Bolshevik officials had acquired the habits of command. Another novelty was the ‘cleansing’ of the party. The Russian word for this, chistka, is usually translated as purge; and the first purge in May 1918 was confined to the expulsion of ‘idlers, hooligans, adventurers, drunkards and thieves’ from the party’s ranks. By mid-1919 there were 150,000 party members: half the total claimed twelve months previously. The willingness to exclude people in order to maintain purity of membership can be traced back to Lenin’s wrangles with the Mensheviks in 1903. But practicality as well as ideology was at work; for the one-party state was attracting recruits to the party who were not even committed socialists. Periodic cleansings of the ranks were vital to raise the degree of political dependability.

The political leadership at central and local levels distrusted the various state institutions, and repeatedly called for ‘the most severe discipline’. In 1920 a Central Control Commission was established to eradicate abuses in the party. But the party was not the only institution presenting problems of control. The People’s Commissariats gave even greater cause of concern to the Kremlin leadership, and a Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate was established in the same year to investigate the reliability and efficiency of the various civilian state bodies in their day-to-day work.

Of all bodies, it was the party that underwent the largest change. Yet the habit of criticizing the leadership remained; and, while the official who counted for most in local party committees was the committee secretary,⁴⁵ discussion with other committee members was still the norm. Furthermore, the Politburo, Orgburo and Secretariat lacked the accurate, up-to-date information which would have enabled them to intervene with confidence in local disputes. The Red Army, too, was resistant at its lower levels to tight detailed control. Ill-discipline among soldiers was notorious. There are thought to have been a million deserters and conscription defaulters by the end of 1919.⁴⁶ Indisputably the Soviet state as a whole increased its internal co-ordination in the Civil War; but chaos remained in all institutions. And the proliferation of bodies such as the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate had the effect of enlarging the bureaucracy without increasing its efficiency.

This sprawling state ruled a disgruntled society, and there was much to give rise to resentment. The food rations were poor. Disease and malnutrition killed eight million people in 1918–20.⁴⁷ Political parties other than the Bolsheviks were persecuted or suppressed. ‘Barrier detachments’ were arresting persons carrying food for the black market.⁴⁸ The workers were angry about such conditions and called for an end to the Bolshevik monopoly of political power. Strikes took place in Petrograd, Moscow, Tula and elsewhere during the Civil War; they became especially intense once the danger from the Whites had been eliminated. The women, girls, boys and residual skilled men in the Russian work-force had just enough energy left to make protest. Mutinies broke out in army garrisons, and by mid-1920 there were hints that the loyalty of the pro-Bolshevik sailors of the Kronstadt naval garrison might be fading.

Peasants clashed with the food-supplies commissars across the country. According to official figures, 344 rebellions are reported as having broken out by mid-1919.⁴⁹ In 1920, severe trouble was reported from the Volga provinces, especially Tambov, from Ukraine, Siberia and the North Caucasus. The villages were in revolt. They hated the conscription of their menfolk, the requisitioning of foodstuffs, the infringements of customary peasant law, the ban on private trade with the towns and the compulsion of households to supply free labour to the authorities for the felling of timber and the clearing of roads.⁵⁰ The Bolshevik party assumed that the answer was to intensify repression. Industry and agriculture, too, were to be brought more firmly under the state’s control. Trotski proposed that Red Army soldiers, instead of being demobilized, should be transferred into labour armies; Lenin was firmly attached to the policy of requisitioning foodstuffs through a centrally-assigned set of quotas: the economic programme of the Civil War was to be maintained in peacetime.

The other way out of the emergency for the Russian Communist Party was socialist revolution in Europe. During 1919 they had continued to probe opportunities to link up with the Hungarian Soviet Republic until its collapse in August. The Bavarian Soviet Republic had been overturned in May. Yet the cities of northern Italy, too, were in ferment: as one door closed, another was thought to be opening. The party’s optimism was all the more striking since Red rule in the borderlands of Russia remained under threat. Conflicts with the Poles took place in the course of the year, and erupted into full-scale war when Józef Piłsudski invaded Ukraine and took Kiev in May 1920. The Red Army gathered support at this conjuncture from Russians in general. The arthritic former Imperial commander Alexander Brusilov came out of retirement to urge his former subordinates to fulfil their patriotic duty by seeing off the Poles; and, by July, Piłsudski’s army was fleeing westwards.

Lenin spotted his chance to carry revolution into central Europe. The Red Army was instructed to plunge into Poland and then into Germany. To his colleagues Lenin confided: ‘My personal opinion is that for this purpose it is necessary to sovietize Hungary and perhaps Czechia and Romania too.’⁵¹ Italian communists in Moscow for the Second Congress of Comintern were told to pack their bags and go home to help organize a revolution. In fact the other Politburo members were doubtful about Lenin’s judgement; they especially questioned whether the Polish working class would rise to welcome the Red Army as its liberator. But Lenin had his way and the Reds hastened across eastern Poland. A pitched battle occurred by the river Vistula, short of Warsaw, in mid-August. The Reds were defeated. The dream of taking revolution to other countries on the point of a bayonet was dispelled.

The débâcle in Poland concentrated minds upon the difficulties at home. Even before the Polish-Soviet War there had been attempts to modify economic policies. The most notable was Trotski’s proposal to the Central Committee in February 1920 that, in certain provinces and with certain restrictions, grain requisitioning should be replaced with a tax-in-kind that would be fixed at a lower level of procurement. He was turned down after a heated debate in which Lenin denounced him as an advocate of laissez-faire capitalism.⁵²

Such disputes demonstrated how hard it was to promote any change of policy; for Trotski’s proposal seemed bold only within a milieu which viscerally detested capitalism. Lenin, too, suffered as he had made Trotski suffer. When a Soviet republic was set up in Azerbaijan in April 1920, Lenin proposed that foreign concessionnaires should be invited to restore the Baku oilfields to production. Since 1918 he had seen ‘concessions’ as vital to economic recovery, but his suggestion now caused outrage among Bolshevik leaders in the Transcaucasus. If Baku oil were to be exploited again by the Alfred Nobel Company, hardly any non-private industry would be left in Baku.⁵³ Lenin also urged, at the Eighth Congress of Soviets in December 1920, that richer peasant households should be materially rewarded for any additional gains in agricultural productivity rather than be persecuted as kulaks. The Congress was horrified and most of Lenin’s scheme was rejected.⁵⁴ The party leadership at the centre and the localities was determined to maintain existing economic policy.

And so it came about that the great controversy in the Bolshevik party in the winter of 1920–21 was not about grain requisitioning or about the return of foreign companies but about the trade unions. In November, Trotski had proposed that the unions should be turned into agencies of the state. Strikes would be banned; wage increases would be forgone. The Workers’ Opposition criticized this as yet another sign of the bureaucratization of the October Revolution. Others in the party, including Lenin, simply felt that Trotski’s project was unrealizable at a time of turmoil in the country. Ferocious debate broke out within the party. But as Bolshevik leaders haggled over Marxist doctrine on the labour movement, the Soviet economy moved towards catastrophe and a growing number of peasants, workers, soldiers and sailors rebelled against the victors of the Civil War.

7 The New Economic Policy (1921–1928)

The basic compound of the Soviet order had been invented by Lenin and his fellow communist leaders within a couple of years of the October Revolution. There had been created a centralized, one-ideology dictatorship of a single party which permitted no challenge to its monopoly of power. The Bolshevik party itself was strictly organized; the security police were experts at persecution and there was systematic subordination of constitutional and legal propriety to political convenience. The regime had also expropriated great segments of the economy. Industry, banking, transport and foreign trade were already nationalized and agriculture and domestic trade were subject to heavy state regulation. All these elements were to remain intact in ensuing decades.

The Civil War had added to the pressures which resulted in the creation of the compound. On taking power in 1917, the communist leaders had not possessed a preparatory blueprint. Nevertheless they had come with assumptions and inclinations which predisposed them towards a high degree of state economic dominance, administrative arbitrariness, ideological intolerance and political violence. They also lived for struggle. They wanted action; they could barely contain their impatience. And they were outnumbered by enemies at home and abroad. They had always expected the party to be ‘the vanguard’ of the Revolution. Leadership was a key virtue for them. If they wanted to prevail as the country’s rulers, the communists would have been pushed into introducing some kind of party-run state even in the absence of a civil war — and, of course, the way that the October Revolution had occurred made a civil war virtually certain.

This in turn meant that once the Civil War was over, the party-state was unlikely to be dismantled by the Russian Communist Party. The party-state was at the core of the Soviet compound. Without the party-state, it would not be long before all the other elements in the compound underwent dissolution.

Even as things stood, not all the elements were as yet sustainable — at least, not in their entirety — in the harsh conditions of 1920–21. Popular discontent could no longer simply be suppressed. Even among those segments in society which had preferred the Reds to the Whites in the Civil War there were many people unwilling to tolerate a prolongation of wartime policies. Administrative disorder was increasing. Whole nations and whole regions were supervised only patchily from Moscow. The technical facilities for control were in a ruinous state: transport and communications were becoming a shambles. Most industrial enterprises had ceased production: factory output in 1920 was recorded as being eighty-six per cent lower than in 1913. Agriculture, too, had been reduced to a shabby condition. The grain harvest of 1920 was only about three fifths of the annual average for the half-decade before the Great War.¹

By the start of 1921, strategical choice could no longer be avoided. Lenin, having had conversations while visiting peasants, at last recognized the enormity of the emergency. For him, the ultimate alarm bell was sounded by the rural revolt in Tambov province. The last great peasant risings in Russia had occurred in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries under the leaderships of Razin, Bolotnikov and Pugachëv. Ancient Russia now confronted the Bolsheviks in struggle. Lenin foresaw that force alone would not be enough to quell the peasants, and he decided that in order to sustain the political dictatorship he had to offer economic relaxations.

In his opinion, the peasantry had to be placated by the replacement of grain requisitioning with a tax in kind. Knowing that this would evoke intense opposition in his party, he initially limited the discussion to the Politburo. On 8 February 1921 he convinced its members of the need for urgent measures and a resolution was passed calling for a partial re-legalization of ‘local economic exchange’ in grain.² Such fussiness of language was necessary to avoid offending the ideological sensibilities among fellow Bolsheviks. But the underlying purpose was unmistakable: the Politburo intended to restore private commercial activity. In addition, the tax-in-kind was to be set at a much lower level than the grain-requisitioning quotas and would secure only the minimum of the state’s requirements on behalf of civilian consumers. These measures were the core of what quickly became known as the New Economic Policy (or NEP).

Some such gamble was essential for the regime to survive. The Politburo permitted a press campaign to commend the NEP’s merits to the rest of the party. Having had his fingers burnt in the Brest-Litovsk controversy, Lenin for some weeks distanced himself from the policy by getting obscure party officials to put his case; and the commission established by the Politburo to elaborate the details was headed not by himself but by Kamenev.³

But thereafter Lenin, supported by Trotski and Kamenev, canvassed for the NEP. It was of assistance to him that the party had exhausted itself in the winter’s dispute about the trade unions. A desire for unity had emerged before the opening of the Tenth Party Congress on 15 March 1921, a desire stiffened by news of the outbreak of a mutiny by the naval garrison on Kronstadt island. The sailors demanded multi-party democracy and an end to grain requisitioning. Petrograd was affected by discontent and strikes broke out in its major factories. Those many Congress delegates who had not accepted Lenin’s arguments were at last persuaded of the argument for economic reform. Lenin anyway stressed that he did not advocate political reform. Indeed he asserted that the other parties should be suppressed and that even internal factions among the Bolsheviks should be banned. The retreat in economics was to be accompanied by an offensive in politics.

Congress delegates from all factions, including the Workers’ Opposition, volunteered to join the Red Army units ordered to quell the Kronstadt mutineers. Mikhail Tukhachevski, a commander who had recently returned from the Polish front, clad his soldiers in white camouflage to cross the iced-over Gulf of Finland undetected. In the meantime a depleted Party Congress ungratefully condemned the Workers’ Opposition as an ‘anarcho-syndicalist deviation’ from the principles of Bolshevism.

Lenin had got his way at the Congress in securing an end to grain requisitioning. And yet there was trouble ahead. The NEP would remain ineffective if confined to a legalization of private trade in foodstuffs. Other economic sectors, too, needed to be removed from the state’s monopolistic ownership and control. Peasants would refrain from selling their crops in the towns until they could buy industrial goods with their profits; but large-scale state-owned factories could not quickly produce the shoes, nails, hand-ploughs and spades that were wanted by the peasantry. Rapid economic recovery depended upon a reversion of workshops and small manufacturing firms to their previous owners. There was no technical impediment to this. But politically it would be hard to impose on local communist officials who already at the Party Congress had indicated their distaste for any further compromises with the principle of private profit.⁴

Lenin had to come into the open to persuade these officials to soften their stance. Indefatigably he tried to attract Western capitalists to Soviet Russia. On 16 March, after months of negotiation, an Anglo-Soviet Trade treaty was signed; and Soviet commercial delegations were established in several other European countries by the end of the year. Lenin also continued to push for the sale of ‘concessions’ in the oil industry in Baku and Grozny. The Red Army’s defeat in the war in Poland convinced him that temporary co-operation with international capitalism would better facilitate economic reconstruction than the pursuit of ‘European socialist revolution’. If Lenin needed proof, it was supplied by the German communists. In the last fortnight of March 1921, encouraged by Zinoviev and Bukharin, they tried to seize power in Berlin. The German government easily suppressed this botched ‘March Action’; and Lenin roundly upbraided his comrades for their adventurism.

By then Lenin was no longer looking only to foreign concessionaires for help with economic recovery. In April he argued in favour of expanding the NEP beyond its original limits; and he achieved his ends when the Tenth Party Conference in May 1921 agreed to re-legalize private small-scale manufacturing. Soon afterwards peasants obtained permission to trade not only locally but anywhere in the country. Commercial middlemen, too, were allowed to operate again. Private retail shops were reopened. Rationing was abolished in November 1921, and everyone was expected to buy food from personal income. In August 1921, state enterprises had been reorganized into large ‘trusts’ responsible for each great manufacturing and mining subsector; they were instructed that raw materials had to be bought and workers to be paid without subsidy from the central state budget. In March 1922, moreover, Lenin persuaded the Eleventh Party Congress to allow peasant households to hire labour and rent land.

Thus a reintroduction of capitalist practices took place and ‘War Communism’, as the pre-1921 economic measures were designated, was ended. A lot of Bolsheviks felt that the October Revolution was being betrayed. Tempers became so frayed that the Tenth Conference proceedings were kept secret.⁵ Not since the Brest-Litovsk controversy had Lenin had to endure such invective. But he fought back, purportedly shouting at his critics: ‘Please don’t try teaching me what to include and what to leave out of Marxism: eggs don’t teach their hens how to lay!’⁶

He might not have succeeded at the Conference if his critics had not appreciated the party’s need for unity until the rebellions in the country had been suppressed; and Lenin sternly warned about the adverse effects of factionalism. Throughout 1921–2 there persisted an armed threat to the regime. The Kronstadt mutiny was put down; its organizers were shot and thousands of ordinary sailors, most of whom had supported the Bolsheviks in 1917, were dispatched to the Ukhta labour camp in the Russian north.⁷ The rural revolts, too, were crushed. Red Army commander Tukhachevski, after defeating the Kronstadters, was sent to quell the Tambov peasant uprising in mid-1921.⁸ Insurrections in the rest of the Volga region, in Ukraine, Siberia and the North Caucasus were treated similarly. The Politburo also smashed the industrial strikes. The message went forth from the Kremlin that the economic reforms were not a sign of weakened political resolve.

Not only real but also potential trouble-makers were dealt with severely. Those members of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party’s Central Committee who were still at liberty were rounded up. In summer 1922 they were paraded in Soviet Russia’s first great show-trial and given lengthy prison sentences. There was a proposal by Lenin to do the same to the Menshevik Organizational Committee, and he was annoyed at being overruled by the Politburo.⁹ But the lesson was administered that the Bolshevik party, having won the Civil War, would share its power with no other party.

Nor were there to be illusions about national self-determination. It is true that Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania had gained independence and that provinces had been lost to Poland, Romania and Turkey. Yet by March 1921, when Georgia was re-conquered, the Red Army had largely restored the boundaries of the Russian Empire. Russian nationalists applauded this. It would not be long, they surmised, before the Bolsheviks accommodated themselves to Russia’s geo-political interests and abandoned their communist ideas. Red Army commanders, some of whom had served as officers in the Imperial Army, were delighted that Russian military, political and economic power had risen again over two continents. In the People’s Commissariats, too, many long-serving bureaucrats felt a similar pride. The émigré liberal Professor Nikolai Trubetskoi founded a ‘Change of Landmarks’ group that celebrated the NEP as the beginning of the end of the Bolshevik revolutionary project.

The Bolsheviks responded that they had made the October Revolution expressly to establish a multinational state wherein each national or ethnic group would be free from oppression by any other. They refused to accept that they were imperialists even though many nations were held involuntarily under their rule. They were able to delude themselves in this fashion for two main reasons. The first was that they undoubtedly wanted to abolish the old empires around the world. In this sense they really were anti-imperialists. Secondly, the central Bolshevik leadership had no conscious desire to give privileges to the Russian nation. Most of them were appalled by the evidence that Russian nationalist sentiment existed at the lower levels of the Soviet state and even the communist party. And so by being anti-nationalist, Lenin and his colleagues assumed that they were automatically anti-imperialist.

But how, then, were they going to resolve their very complex problems of multi-national governance in peacetime? Probably most leading Bolsheviks saw the plurality of independent Soviet republics as having been useful to gain popularity during the Civil War but as being likely to reinforce nationalist tendencies in the future.¹⁰ There was consensus in the party that a centralized state order was vital; no one was proposing that any of the republican governments or communist parties should have the right to disobey the Bolshevik leadership in the Kremlin. But how to achieve this? Stalin, who headed the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities, wished to deprive the Soviet republics of even their formal independence by turning them into autonomous republics within the RSFSR on the Bashkirian model. His so-called federalism would therefore involve the simple expedient of incorporating Ukraine, Belorussia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia into an enlarged RSFSR, and he had been working along these lines since mid-1920.¹¹

Lenin thought Stalin’s project smacked of Russian imperial dominance; and his counter-proposal was to federate the RSFSR on equal terms with the other Soviet republics in a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.¹² In summer 1922 their disagreements became acrimonious. Yet it must be noted that the ground separating Lenin and Stalin was narrow. Neither aimed to disband the system of authoritarian rule through a highly centralized, unitary communist party run from Moscow. While castigating the United Kingdom’s retention of India with her empire, the Politburo had no scruples about annexing states which had gained their independence from Russia between 1917 and 1921.

In any case Lenin and Stalin themselves faced common opposition in the localities. Their adversaries fell into two main groups. The first group demanded a slackening of the Kremlin’s grip on republican political bodies.¹³ Even so, none of these persons demanded a complete release. They wished to remain part of a common Soviet state and understood that they depended upon the Red Army for their survival in government. The other group of adversaries felt that official policy was not too strict but too indulgent towards the non-Russian republics. Both Lenin and Stalin wished to keep the promises made since the October Revolution that native-language schools, theatres and printing presses would be fostered. Stalin in 1921 was accused of ‘artificially implanting’ national consciousness; the charge was that, if the Belorussians had not been told they were Belorussians, nobody would have been any the wiser.¹⁴

This debate was of great importance (and the reason why it remains little noticed is that Stalin suppressed discussion of it in the 1930s when he did not wish to appear indulgent to the non-Russians). Stalin’s self-defence was that his priority was to disseminate not nationalist but socialist ideas. His argument was primarily pragmatic. He pointed out that all verbal communication had to occur in a comprehensible language and that most of the people inhabiting the Soviet-held lands bordering Russia did not speak Russian. A campaign of compulsory Russification would therefore cause more political harm than good.

Nor did Stalin fail to mention that the vast majority of the population was constituted by peasants, who had a traditional culture which had yet to be permeated by urban ideas.¹⁵ If Marxism was to succeed in the Soviet Union, the peasantry had to be incorporated into a culture that was not restricted to a particular village. Whatever else they were, peasants inhabiting the Belorussian region were not Russians. It behoved the communist party to enhance their awareness of their own national culture — or at least such aspects of their national culture that did not clash blatantly with Bolshevik ideology. Thus would more and more people be brought into the ambit of the Soviet political system. Bolshevism affirmed that society had to be activated, mobilized, indoctrinated. For this reason, in contrast with other modern multinational states which had discouraged national consciousness, Politburo members fostered it. They did so because they worried lest there should be further national revolts against Bolshevism; but they also calculated that, by avoiding being seen as imperial oppressors, they would eventually win over all their national and ethnic groups to principles of international fraternity. The central party leaders had not ceased being militant internationalists.

A few leading Bolsheviks resented this as being a cynical approach. Practically all these critics were post-1917 recruits to the party, and prominent among them was a young Tatar named Mirza Said Sultan-Galiev. As a functionary in the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities, he had impugned any action that seemed to favour Russians at the expense of the other national and ethnic groups.¹⁶ Matters came to a head in 1923 when Sultan-Galiev advocated the desirability of a pan-Turkic socialist state uniting the Muslim peoples of the former Russian and Ottoman Empires. Sultan-Galiev was arrested for promoting a scheme that would have broken up the Soviet state. This first arrest of a senior communist leader by the communist authorities was a sign of the acute importance they attached to the ‘national question’.

Yet Politburo members remained worried about the potential appeal of pan-Turkism, and sought to accentuate the differences among Muslims by marking out separate administrative regions for the Uzbeks, Tajiks and Kazakhs. Stimulation was given for their paths of cultural development to diverge. This was not the sole method whereby the Bolsheviks tried to divide and rule: they also bought the acquiescence of majority nationalities in each Soviet republic at the expense of the local minorities. Romanians, Greeks, Poles and Jews in Ukraine did not receive as much favourable attention as Ukrainians. And if the attempt to rule the nations by dividing them among themselves ever became ineffectual, the Cheka — which was known from 1923 as the United Main Political Administration (or by its Russian acronym OGPU) — arrested troublesome groups and individuals. In the last resort the Red Army, too, was used. A Georgian insurrection against the Soviet regime in 1924 was ferociously suppressed.¹⁷

Nations picked up whatever scraps the Bolshevik leadership was willing to toss from its table. These scraps were far from insubstantial. Native-language schooling flourished as never before in Russian history (and the Soviet authorities provided the Laz people, which numbered only 635 persons, with not only a school building but even an alphabet).¹⁸ Ukraine had not been an administrative-territorial unit before 1917; in formal terms it had been only a collection of provinces subject to the tsar. In the 1920s the Politburo sanctioned the return to Kiev from abroad of the nationalist historian Mihaylo Hrushevskyi, who made no secret of his nationalism.

At the same time the Bolshevik central leadership wanted to give stiff ideological competition to Hrushevskyi and his counterparts in other Soviet republics. The difficulty was that the party’s rank-and-file membership even in the non-Russian regions consisted overwhelmingly of Russians. Steps were taken to train and promote cadres of the local nationality. This was the policy known as korenizatsiya (or ‘the planting down of roots’). Initially it could not be done, especially in central Asia but in other places too, without appeals being made to young men and women who were not necessarily of working-class background. Many potential recruits would have to be drawn from the local traditional élites. The hope was that the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment and the Party Central Committee’s Agitation and Propaganda Department would succeed in nudging the promotees towards feeling that their national and cultural aspirations were compatible with Bolshevik revolutionary aims.

Confidential discussions to settle the state’s constitutional structure proceeded. In September 1922 Lenin, despite still convalescing from a major stroke, won his struggle against Stalin’s proposal for the RSFSR to engorge the other Soviet republics. Instead all these republics, including the RSFSR, were to join a federation to be called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (or USSR). This meant that Russia — in the form of the RSFSR — was for the first time given its own boundaries within the larger state it belonged to. At the time this hardly mattered in any practical way to most Russians; it was only in the late 1980s, when Boris Yeltsin campaigned for the Russian presidency before the USSR’s disintegration, that the possible implications of delineating ‘Russia’ as a cartographic entity became evident. Under the NEP, however, the Bolsheviks anticipated not disintegration but, if anything, expansion. And so the decision on the USSR Constitution was ratified in principle by the First All-Union Congress of Soviets on 31 December 1922, and the central government newspaper Izvestiya hailed the events as ‘a New Year’s gift to the workers and peasants of the world’.¹⁹

In the communist party across the country only the Georgian leadership made strong objection. They had lobbied Lenin for several months, claiming that Stalin had ridden roughshod over Georgian national sensitivities. They particularly resented the plan to insert Georgia into the USSR not as a Soviet republic but as a part of a Transcaucasian Federation. In their estimation, this was a trick whereby Stalin could emasculate Lenin’s somewhat gentler attitude to Georgians as a people. They demanded that Georgia should enter the USSR on the same terms as Ukraine. But Lenin and the Politburo accepted Stalin’s advice in this specific matter. The formation of a Transcaucasian Federation would enable the curtailment of unpleasantries meted out to their respective ethnic minorities by the Armenian, Azerbaijani and Georgian Soviet republics: there was abundant evidence that the Georgians, sinned against by Stalin, were not blameless in their treatment of non-Georgians.²⁰

The Transcaucasian Federation would also diminish Turkey’s temptation to interfere in Muslim-inhabited areas on the side of Azerbaijan against Armenia. Continuing nervousness about the Turks induced central party leaders to award Nagorny Karabakh to ‘Muslim’ Azerbaijan despite the fact that the local population were Armenian Christians.²¹

Azeri-inhabited Nakhichevan, too, was given to Azerbaijan even though Nakhichevan lay enclosed within Armenia and did not abutt upon Azerbaijani territory. The central party leadership’s measures were therefore not untainted by considerations of expediency, and Armenians had little cause to celebrate the territorial settlement. Cossack farmers in the North Caucasus were even less contented. The Politburo took the decision to secure the acquiescence of the non-Russian peoples of that region by returning land to them that had been taken from them in the previous century by the tsarist authorities. Thousands of Cossack settlers were rounded up and deported to other regions held by the Soviet authorities in April 1921.²² National deportations were to become a basic aspect of governmental policy in the 1930s and 1940s, but the precedent had been set under Lenin.

Yet there was a degree of justification in the party’s claim that its treatment of the national and ethnic minorities put many European governments to shame; and prominent Bolshevik C. G. Rakovsky argued that many peoples in eastern and central Europe would relish the degree of autonomy accorded in the USSR.²³ Nevertheless several leading party figures were fearful of the long-term risks involved. The administrative demarcation of territory according to national and ethnic demography laid down internal boundaries that could become guidelines for nationalism. The opportunities for linguistic and cultural self-expression, too, allowed the different peoples to develop their respective national identities. Only ruthless interventions from Moscow stopped these chickens of official policy coming home to roost before the late 1980s. Lenin thought he was helping to resolve the national question; in fact he inadvertently aggravated it.

The nation with the greatest potential to upset Bolshevik policy were the Russians themselves. According to the census published in 1927 they amounted to nearly three fifths of the population,²⁴ and it could not be discounted that one day they might prove susceptible to nationalist ideas. Under the NEP they were therefore the nationality most tightly restricted in their cultural self-expression. Classic Russian nineteenth-century writers who had disseminated anti-socialist notions lost official approval; and Fëdor Dostoevski, who had inspired thinkers as diverse as Nietzsche and Freud, was no longer published. Russian military heroes such as Mikhail Kutuzov, the victor over Napoleon, were depicted as crude imperialists. Allegedly no emperor, patriarch or army general had ever done a good deed in his life. Non-Bolshevik variants of Russian socialist thought were equally subjected to denigration, and Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary policies were denounced as hostile to the requirements of working people. Traditions of Russian thought which were uncongenial to Bolshevism were systematically ridiculed.

The Russian Orthodox Church especially alarmed the Bolsheviks. A survey of Russian peasants in the mid-1920s suggested that fifty-five per cent were active Christian worshippers. This was almost certainly a large underestimate; and there can be no denying that the Russian Orthodox Church constituted part and parcel of the Russian identity in the minds of most ethnic Russians. In 1922 Lenin arranged for the execution of several bishops on the pretext that they refused to sell their treasures to help famine relief in the Volga region. Anti-religious persecution did not cease with the introduction of the NEP, and Lenin’s language in Politburo discussions of Christianity was vicious, intemperate and cynical.²⁵

Yet generally the Bolsheviks became more restrained in the mid-1920s. The OGPU was instructed to concentrate its efforts on demoralizing and splitting the Church by indirect methods rather than by physical assault. This policy took the form of suborning priests, spreading disinformation and infiltrating agents; and when Patriarch Tikhon died in 1925, the Church was prevented by the Soviet authorities from electing a successor to him. Metropolitan Sergei, who was transferred from Nizhni Novgorod to Moscow, was allowed to style himself only as Acting Patriarch. Meanwhile Trotski had observed the rise of a ‘Living Church’ reform movement in the Church that despised the official ecclesiastical hierarchy and preached that socialism was Christianity in its modern form. The adherents of this movement were reconcilable to Soviet rule so long as they could practise their faith. Trotski urged that favourable conditions should be afforded to ‘Living Church’ congregations in order that a wedge could be driven down the middle of the Russian Orthodox Church.²⁶

Other Christian denominations were handled less brusquely. Certain sects, such as the Old Believers, were notable for their farming expertise and the central party leadership did not want to harm their contribution to the economy as a result of clashes over religion.²⁷ Non-Russian Christian organizations were also treated with caution. For instance, the harassment of the Georgian and Armenian Orthodox Churches diminished over the decade. Islam was left at peace even more than Christianity (although there was certainly interference with religious schools and law-courts). The Politburo saw that, while secularism was gaining ground among urban Russians, Muslims remained deeply attached — in towns as in the villages — to their faith. In desperation the party tried to propagate Marxism in Azerbaijan and central Asia through the medium of excerpts from the Koran that emphasized communal, egalitarian values. Yet the positive results for the party were negligible: ‘the idiocy of religion’ was nowhere near as easy to eradicate as the communists had imagined.

They had a nerve in being so condescending. Leading Bolshevik cadres themselves were intense believers in a faith of a certain kind. The works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were like prophetic works in the Bible for most of them; and Lenin as well as Marx and Engels were beatified. Marxism was an ersatz religion for the communist party.

Real religious belief was mocked in books and journals of the state-subsidized League of the Militant Godless. Citizens who engaged in public worship lost preferment in Soviet state employment; and priests had been disenfranchised under the terms of successive constitutions since 1918. In local practice, however, a more relaxed attitude was permitted. Otherwise the middle strata of the Azerbaijani government would have had to be sacked. Even in Russia there was the same problem. Officials in Smolensk province decided that since a disavowal of God did not appear in the party rules, it should not be a criterion for party membership.²⁸ Such pragmatism, as with other aspects of the NEP, stemmed from a sense of short-term weakness. But this did not signify any loss of medium-term confidence: both the central and local party leadership continued to assume that religious observance was a relic of old ‘superstitions’ that would not endure.

Not only priests but also all potentially hostile groups in society were denied civic rights. The last remaining industrialists, bankers and great landlords had fled when Vrangel’s Volunteer Army departed the Crimean peninsula, paying with their last roubles to take the last available ferries across the Black Sea or to hide in haycarts as they were trundled over the land frontier with Poland.

As the ‘big and middle bourgeoisie’ vanished into the emigration or into obscurity in Russia, the Politburo picked on whichever suspected ‘class enemies’ remained. Novelists, painters and poets were prominent victims. The cultural intelligentsia had always contained restless, awkward seekers after new concepts and new theories. The Bolshevik leaders discerned the intelligentsia’s potential as a shaper of public opinion, and for every paragraph that Lenin wrote castigating priests he wrote a dozen denouncing secular intellectuals. The most famous representatives of Russian high culture were held under surveillance by the OGPU and the Politburo routinely discussed which of them could be granted an exit visa or special medical facilities:²⁹ the nearest equivalent would be a post-war British cabinet deciding whether George Orwell could visit France or Evelyn Waugh have a gall-bladder operation.

In summer 1922 the Soviet authorities deported dozens of outstanding Russian writers and scholars. These included a philosopher of world importance, Nikolai Berdyaev, who was interrogated by Dzierżyński. Berdyaev complained that he, too, was a socialist, but one with a more individualist outlook than Dzierżyński. His assertion was rejected; for the Bolsheviks treated non-Bolshevik varieties of socialism as an acute threat to the regime. The deportations taught the intelligentsia that no overt criticisms of the regime would be tolerated; and in June 1922 the Politburo drove home the lesson by reintroducing pre-publication censorship through the agency of a Main Administration for Affairs of Literature and Publishing Houses (which became known as Glavlit and which lasted until its abolition by Gorbachëv). The aim was to insulate Soviet society from the bacillus of ideas alien to Bolshevism.³⁰

The dilemma for Politburo members was that they badly needed the help of intellectuals in effecting the cultural transformation essential for the creation of a socialist society. Scarcely any writers of distinction were Bolsheviks or even sympathizers with the party. An exception was the Futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovski. Not all central party leaders regarded him as a boon to Bolshevism. Lenin remarked: ‘I don’t belong to the admirers of his poetic talent, although I quite admit my own incompetence in this area.’³¹ A warmer welcome was given to the novelist Maksim Gorki even though he had often denounced Leninism and called Lenin a misanthrope before 1917. Gorki, however, had come to believe that atrocities committed in the Civil War had been as much the fault of ordinary citizens in general and of the Soviet state in particular; and he began to soften his comments on the Bolsheviks. Even so, he continued to prefer to live in his villa in Sorrento in Italy to the dacha he would obtain if he returned home.

Trotski and Zinoviev persuaded the Twelfth Party Conference in 1922 that as long as writer-Bolsheviks were so few, the regime would have to make do with ‘fellow travellers’.³² Writers and artists who at least agreed with some of the party’s objectives were to be cosseted. Thousands of roubles were thrown at the feet of those who consented to toe the political line; and Mayakovski, taking pity on the plight of his friends who opposed Marxism-Leninism, discreetly left his banknotes on their sofas. But acts of personal charity did not alter the general situation. Large print-runs, royalties and fame were given to approved authors while poverty and obscurity awaited those who refused to collaborate.

Dissentient thought continued to be cramped under the NEP. The authorities did not always need to ban books from publication: frequently it was enough to suggest that an author should seek another publisher, knowing that Gosizdat, the state publishers, owned practically all the printing-presses and had reduced most private publishers to inactivity. Nevertheless the arts in the 1920s could not have their critical edge entirely blunted if the state also wished to avoid alienating the ‘fellow travellers’. Furthermore, the state could not totally predetermine which writer or painter would acquire a popular following. Sergei Yesenin, a poet and guitar-player who infuriated many Bolshevik leaders because of his Bohemian lifestyle, outmatched Mayakovski in appeal. Whereas Mayakovski wrote eulogies for the factory, twentieth-century machinery and Marxism-Leninism, Yesenin composed nostalgic rhapsodies to the virtues of the peasantry while indulging in the urban vices of cigar-smoking and night-clubbing.

Neither Yesenin nor Mayakovski, however, was comfortable in his role for very long. Indeed both succumbed to a fatal depression: Yesenin killed himself in 1925, Mayakovski in 1930. Yet several of their friends continued to work productively. Isaak Babel composed his masterly short stories about the Red Cavalry in the Polish-Soviet War. Ilf and Petrov wrote The Twelve Chairs poking fun at the NEP’s nouveaux riches as well as at the leather-clad commissars who strutted out of the Red Army into civilian administrative posts after the Civil War. Their satirical bent pleased a Politburo which wished to eradicate bureaucratic habits among state officials; but other writers were less lucky. Yevgeni Zamyatin wrote a dystopian novel, We, which implicitly attacked the regimentative orientation of Bolshevism. The novel’s hero did not even have a name but rather a letter and number, D-503, and the story of his pitiful struggle against the ruler — the baldheaded Benefactor — was a plea for the right of the individual to live his or her life without oppressive interference by the state.

Zamyatin’s work lay unpublished in the USSR; it could be printed only abroad. The grand theorizings of Russian intellectuals about the meaning of life disappeared from published literature. Painting had its mystical explorers in persons such as Marc Chagall (who, until his emigration to western Europe in 1922, went on producing canvasses of Jewish fiddlers, cobblers and rabbis in the poverty-stricken towns and villages around Vitebsk). Practically no great symphonies, operas or ballets were written. The October Revolution and the Civil War were awesome experiences from which most intellectuals recoiled in shock. Many entered a mental black hole where they tried to rethink their notions about the world. It was a process which would last several years; most of the superb poetry of Osip Mandelshtam, Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova came to maturity only in the 1930s.

Central party leaders endeavoured to increase popular respect for those works of literature that conformed to their Marxist vision. They used the negative method of suppression, seizing the presses of hostile political parties and cultural groups and even eliminating those many publications which took a non-political stance. Apolitical light-heartedness virtually disappeared from the organs of public communication.³³ Party leaders also supplied their own propaganda for Bolshevism through Pravda and other newspapers. Posters were produced abundantly. Statues and monuments, too, were commissioned, and there were processions, concerts and speeches on May Day and the October Revolution anniversary.

The regime gave priority to ‘mass mobilization’. Campaigns were made to recruit workers into the Russian Communist Party, the trade unions and the communist youth organization known as the Komsomol. Special attention was paid to increasing the number of Bolsheviks by means of a ‘Lenin Enrolment’ in 1924 and an ‘October Enrolment’ in 1927. As a result the membership rose from 625,000 in 1921 to 1,678,000 at the end of the decade;³⁴ and by that time, too, ten million workers belonged to trade unions.³⁵ A large subsidy was given to the expansion of popular education. Recreational facilities also underwent improvement. Sports clubs were opened in all cities and national teams were formed for football, gymnastics and athletics (in 1912 the Olympic squad had been so neglected that the ferry-boat to Stockholm left without many of its members). Whereas tsarism had struggled to prevent people from belonging to organizations, Bolshevism gave them intense encouragement to join.

The Bolshevik leaders were learning from recent precedents of the German Social-Democratic Party before the Great War and the Italian fascists in the 1920s. Governments of all industrial countries were experimenting with novel techniques of persuasion. Cinemas and radio stations were drawn into the service of the state; and rulers made use of youth movements such as the Boy Scouts. All this was emulated in the USSR. The Bolsheviks had the additional advantage that the practical constraints on their freedom of action were smaller even than in Italy where a degree of autonomy from state control was preserved by several non-fascist organizations, especially by the Catholic Church, after Mussolini’s seizure of power in 1922.

Yet most Soviet citizens had scant knowledge of Marxism-Leninism in general and the party’s current policies. Bolshevik propagandists acknowledged their lack of success,³⁶ and felt that a prerequisite for any basic improvement was the attainment of universal literacy. Teachers inherited from the Imperial regime were induced to return to their jobs. When the Red Cavalry rode across the borderlands in the Polish-Soviet War, commissars tied flash-cards to the backs of the cavalrymen at the front of the file and got the rest to recite the Cyrillic alphabet. This kind of commitment produced a rise in literacy from two in five males between the ages of nine and forty-nine years in 1897 to slightly over seven out of ten in 1927.³⁷ The exhilaration of learning, common to working-class people in other societies undergoing industrialization, was evident in day-schools and night classes across the country.

Despite all the problems, the Soviet regime retained a vision of political, economic and cultural betterment. Many former army conscripts and would-be university students responded enthusiastically. Many of their parents, too, could remember the social oppressiveness of the pre-revolutionary tsarist regime and gave a welcome to the Bolshevik party’s projects for literacy, numeracy, cultural awareness and administrative facility.

This positive reception could be found not only among rank-and-file communists but also more broadly amidst the working class and the peasantry. And experiments with new sorts of living and working were not uncommon. Apartment blocks in many cities were run by committees elected by their inhabitants, and several factories subsidized cultural evenings for their workers. A Moscow orchestra declared itself a democratic collective and played without a conductor. At the end of the Civil War, painters and poets resumed their normal activity and tried to produce works that could be understood not only by the educated few but by the whole society. The Bolshevik central leaders often wished that their supporters in the professions and in the arts would show less interest in experimentation and expend more energy on the basic academic education and industrial and administrative training of the working class. But the utopian mood was not dispelled: the NEP did not put an end to social and cultural innovation.³⁸

For politically ambitious youngsters, furthermore, there were courses leading on to higher education. The new Sverdlov University in Moscow was the pinnacle of a system of ‘agitation and propaganda’ which at lower levels involved not only party schools but also special ‘workers’ faculties’ (rabfaki). Committed to dictatorship of the proletariat, the Politburo wished to put a working-class communist generation in place before the current veteran revolutionaries retired. (Few of them would in fact reach retirement age, because of Stalin’s Great Terror in the 1930s.) Workers and peasants were encouraged, too, to write for newspapers; this initiative, which came mainly from Bukharin, was meant to highlight the many petty abuses of power while strengthening the contact between the party and the working class. Bukharin had a zest for educational progress. He gathered around himself a group of young socialist intellectuals and established an Institute of Red Professors. In 1920 he had shown the way for his protégés by co-authoring a textbook with Yevgeni Preobrazhenski, The ABC of Communism.

Thus the tenets of Bolshevism were disseminated to everyone willing to read them.³⁹ The Soviet proletariat was advertised as the vanguard of world socialism, as the embodiment of the great social virtues, as the class destined to remake history for all time. Posters depicted factory labourers wielding hammers and looking out to a horizon suffused by a red dawn. On everything from newspaper mastheads to household crockery the slogan was repeated: ‘Workers of the world, unite!’

Bolshevik leaders, unlike tsars, strove to identify themselves with ordinary people. Lenin and head of state Mikhail Kalinin were renowned for having the common touch. As it happens, Kalinin — who came from a family of poor peasants in Tver province — had an eye for young middle-class ballerinas. But such information did not appear in Pravda: central party leaders tried to present themselves as ordinary blokes with unflamboyant tastes. This was very obvious even in the way they clothed themselves. Perhaps it was Stalin who best expressed the party’s mood in the 1920s by wearing a simple, grey tunic: he thereby managed to look not only non-bourgeois but also a modest but militant member of a political collective. The etiquette and material tastes of the pre-revolutionary rich were repudiated. Any interest in fine clothes, furniture or interior décor was treated as downright reactionary. A roughness of comportment, speech and dress was fostered.

In fact these leaders were emphasizing what appealed to them in working-class culture and discarding the rest. Much as they extolled the virtues of the industrial worker, they also wanted to reform him or her. Ever since 1902, when Lenin had written his booklet What Is To Be Done?, Bolshevik theory had stressed that the working class would not become socialist by its own devices. The party had to explain and indoctrinate and guide.

The authorities emphasized the need not only for literacy and numeracy but also for punctuality, conscientiousness at work and personal hygiene. The desirability of individual self-improvement was stressed; but so, too, was the goal of getting citizens to subordinate their personal interests to those of the general good as defined by the party. A transformation in social attitudes was deemed crucial. This would involve breaking people’s adherence to the way they thought and acted not only in public life but also within the intimacy of the family, where attitudes of a ‘reactionary’ nature were inculcated and consolidated. Official spokesmen urged wives to refuse to give automatic obedience to husbands, and children were encouraged to challenge the authority of their fathers and mothers. Communal kitchens and factory cafeterias were established so that domestic chores might not get in the way of fulfilment of public duties. Divorce and abortion were available on demand.⁴⁰

Social inhibitions indeed became looser in the 1920s. Yet the Great War and the Civil War played a more decisive role in this process than Bolshevik propaganda. For the popular suspicion of the regime remained acute. A particular source of grievance was the fact that it took until the late 1920s for average wages to be raised to the average amount paid before 1914. This was unimpressive to a generation of the working class which had felt exploited by their employers under Nicholas II. Strikes were frequent under the NEP. The exact number of workers who laid down tools is as yet unascertained, but undoubtedly it was more than the 20,100 claimed by governmental statisticians for 1927.⁴¹

Not that the Politburo was greatly disconcerted by the labour movement. Conflicts tended to be small in scale and short in duration; the raging conflicts of 1920–21 did not recur. The long-standing policy of favouring skilled workers for promotion to administrative posts in politics and industry had the effect of removing many of those who might have made the labour movement more troublesome; and although wages were no higher than before 1914, the state had at least increased rudimentary provision for health care and unemployment benefit.⁴² Above all, the party and the trade unions had offices in all factories and were usually able to see off trouble before it got out of hand; and the resolution of disputes was facilitated by arbitration commissions located in the workplace. The OGPU, too, inserted itself into the process. Once a strike had been brought to an end, the Chekists would advise the management about whom to sack in due course so that industrial conflict might not recur. Sometimes strike leaders were quietly arrested.

Obviously the party leaders could not be complacent about the situation. They could never be entirely sure that a little outbreak of discontent in some factory or other would not explode into a protest movement such as had overwhelmed the monarchy in February 1917. Through the 1920s the Politburo was fumbling for ways to understand the working class in whose name it ruled the USSR.

Workers were not the only group to cause perplexity: the whole society baffled the authorities. The NEP had reintroduced a degree of capitalism; but it was a capitalism different from any previous capitalism in Russia or the external world. Bankers, big industrialists, stockbrokers and landlords were a thing of the past. Foreign entrepreneurs were few, and those few kept out of public view. The main beneficiaries of the NEP in the towns did not conform to the stereotype of a traditional high bourgeoisie; they were more like British spivs after 1945. As a group they were called ‘nepmen’ and were quintessentially traders in scarce goods. They trudged into the villages and bought up vegetables, ceramic pots and knitted scarves. They went round urban workshops and did deals to obtain chairs, buckles, nails and hand tools. And they sold these products wherever there were markets.

It was officially recognized that if the market was to function, there had to be rules. Legal procedures ceased to be mocked as blatantly as in the Civil War. A Procuracy was established in 1922 and among its purposes was the supervision of private commercial transactions. More generally, people were encouraged to assert their rights by recourse to the courts.⁴³

But arbitrary rule remained the norm in practice. The local authorities harassed the traders, small-scale manufacturers and stall-holders: frequently there were closures of perfectly legal enterprises and arrests of their owners.⁴⁴ Lenin had anyway insisted that the Civil Code should enable the authorities to use sanctions including even terror.⁴⁵ This had the predictable effect of inducing the nepmen to enjoy their profits while they could. The dishonest, fur-coated rouble millionaire with a bejewelled woman of ill-repute on either arm was not an excessive caricature of reality in the 1920s. Yet if many nepmen had criminal links, the fault was not entirely theirs; for the regime imposed commercial conditions which compelled all traders to be furtive. Without the nepmen, the gaps in the supply of products would not have been plugged; with them, however, the Bolsheviks were able to claim that capitalist entrepreneurship was an occupation for speculators, sharpsters and pimps.

Yet the Bolshevik belief that the middle class was striving to grab back the economic position it had occupied before 1917 was untrue not only of the higher bourgeoisie but also of lower members of the old middle class. The Russian Empire’s shopkeepers and small businessmen for the most part did not become nepmen. Instead they used their accomplishments in literacy and numeracy to enter state administrative employment. As in the Civil War, they found that with a little redecoration of their accounts of themselves they could get jobs which secured them food and shelter.

The civil bureaucracy included some famous adversaries of the communist party. Among them were several economists, including the former Menshevik Vladimir Groman in the State Planning Commission and ex-Socialist-Revolutionary Nikolai Kondratev in the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture. But such figures with their civic dutifulness were untypical of bureaucrats in general. The grubby, unhelpful state offices became grubbier and even less helpful. Citizens got accustomed to queuing for hours with their petitions. Venality was endemic below the central and middling rungs of the ladder of power. Even in the party, as in Smolensk province in 1928, there was the occasional financial scandal. A pattern of evasiveness had not ceased its growth after the Civil War, and it affected the workers as much as the bureaucrats. In the factories and mines the labour force resisted any further encroachment on their rights at work. Although by law the capacity to hire and fire was within the gift of management, factory committees and local trade union bodies still counted for something in their own enterprises.⁴⁶

Older workers noted that infringements which once would have incurred a foreman’s fine resulted merely in a ticking off. The workers sensed their worth to a party which had promulgated a proletarian dictatorship; they also knew the value of their skills to enterprises which were short of them. One task for the authorities was to inhibit the work-force from moving from job to job. Other jobs and enterprises were nearly always available at least for skilled labour (although unemployment in general grew in the 1920s). Managers were commencing to bribe their best men and women to stay by conceding higher wages.⁴⁷

All these factors reduced the likelihood of the working class revolting against ‘Soviet power’. The mixture of blandishment, manipulation and coercion meant few labourers were keen to join the scanty, scattered groups of anti-Bolshevik socialists — be they Mensheviks, Socialist-Revolutionaries or disillusioned former Bolsheviks — who tried to stir them into organized resistance. Nor is it surprising that the peasants were not minded to challenge ‘Soviet power’. The peasantry had not forgotten the force used by the party to obtain food-supplies, labour and conscripts in the Civil War. They also remembered that the NEP, too, had been introduced by means of unremitting violence. The Red Army, including cavalry units, had been deployed not only to suppress revolts but also to force peasants to increase the sown area in 1921–2. A deep rancour was still felt towards the town authorities, but it was the rancour of political resignation, not of rebellious intent.

In any case, not everything went badly for the peasantry. The total fiscal burden as a proportion of the income of the average peasant household differed little from the normal ratio before the Great War; and their standard of living recovered after the Civil War. Certainly the pattern of the grain trade changed in the 1920s. This was mainly the result of the fall in prices for cereals on the world market. Consequently most of the wheat which had gone to the West under Nicholas II stayed in the country. A large amount of any harvest was not sold to the towns, for peasant households could often get better deals in other villages. Alternatively they could feed up their livestock or just hoard their stocks and wait for a further raising of prices. The villages were theirs again, as briefly they had been in 1917–18. Rural soviets were installed by visiting urban officialdom, but their significance consisted mainly in the creation of an additional layer of administrative corruption. Moscow’s political campaigns went barely noticed. Peasants continued to have a hard, short and brutish life; but at least it was their own style of life, not a style inflicted upon them by Emperor, landlord or commissar.

This was a phenomenon regretted by the Bolsheviks, who managed to establish only 17,500 party groups in the countryside by 1927⁴⁸ — one for every 1200 square kilometres. It was bad enough that workers preferred Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford to Soviet propaganda films.⁴⁹ Worse still was the fact that few peasants even knew what a cinema was or cared to find out. The USSR was a predominantly agrarian country with poor facilities in transport, communication and administration. As a result, it was virtually as ‘under-governed’ as the Russian Empire.

Such a structure of power was precarious and the Soviet regime reinforced its endeavour to interpose the state into the affairs of society. The stress on ‘accountancy and supervision’ had not originated in Russia with the Bolsheviks: it had been a feature of the tsarist administrativetradition. But Leninist theory gave huge reinforcement to it. Surveillance, both open and covert, was a large-scale activity. Contemporary bureaucracies in all industrial countries were collecting an ever larger amount of information on their societies, but the trend was hyper-developed in the USSR. Vast surveys were conducted on economic and social life: even the acquisition of a job as a navvy entailed the completion of a detailed questionnaire. For example, Matvei Dementevich Popkov’s work-book shows that he was born in 1894 to Russian parents. He had only a primary-school education. Popkov joined the Builders’ Union in 1920 but refrained from entering the communist party. He had had military experience, probably in the Civil War.

The distrust felt by the central party leadership for both its society and even its own state continued to grow. Control organs such as the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate and the Party Central Control Commission had their authority increased. Investigators were empowered to enter any governmental institution so as to question functionaries and examine financial accounts.⁵⁰

And yet who was to control the controllers? The Bolshevik leaders assumed that things would be fine so long as public institutions, especially the control organs, drew their personnel mainly from Bolsheviks and pro-Bolshevik workers. But how were the leaders to know who among such persons were genuinely reliable? Under the NEP the system known as the nomenklatura was introduced. Since mid-1918, if not earlier, the central party bodies had made the main appointments to Sovnarkom, the Red Army, the Cheka and the trade unions. In 1923 this system was formalized by the composition of a list of about 5,500 designated party and governmental posts — the nomenklatura — whose holders could be appointed only by the central party bodies. The Secretariat’s Files-and-Distribution Department (Uchraspred) compiled a file-index on all high-ranking functionaries so that sensible appointments might be made.⁵¹

And provincial party secretaries, whose posts belonged to this central nomenklatura, were instructed to draw up local nomenklaturas for lower party and governmental posts in analogous fashion. The internal regulation of the one-party state was tightened. The graded system of nomenklaturas was meant to ensure that the policies of the Politburo were carried out by functionaries whom it could trust; and this system endured, with recurrent modifications, through to the late 1980s.

This same system, although it increased central control, had inherent difficulties. Candidates for jobs knew in advance that overt political loyalty and class origins counted for more than technical expertise. But this induced people to lie about their background. Over-writing and over-claiming became a way of life. The state reacted by appointing emissaries to check the accuracy of reports coming to Moscow. Yet this only strengthened the incentive to lie. And so the state sent out yet more investigative commissions. The party itself was not immune to the culture of falsehood. Fiddling and fudging pervaded the operation of lower Bolshevik bodies. Each local leader formed a group of political clients who owed him allegiance, right or wrong.⁵² There was also a reinforcement of the practice whereby local functionaries could gather together in a locality and quietly ignore the capital’s demands. Although the party was more dynamic than the rest of the Soviet state, its other characteristics gave cause for concern in the Kremlin.

The NEP had saved the regime from destruction; but it had induced its own grave instabilities into the compound of the Soviet order. The principle of private profit clashed in important economic sectors with central planning objectives. Nepmen, clerics, better-off peasants, professional experts and artists were quietly beginning to assert themselves. Under the NEP there was also a resurgence of nationalist, regionalist and religious aspirations; and the arts and sciences, too, offered cultural visions at variance with Bolshevism. Soviet society under the New Economic Policy was a mass of contradictions and unpredictabilities, dead ends and opportunities, aspirations and discontents.

8 Leninism and its Discontents

It would have been possible for these instabilities to persist well into the 1930s if the Politburo had been more favourably disposed to the NEP. Admittedly Lenin came to believe that the NEP, which had started as an economic retreat, offered space for a general advance. He argued that the policy would enable the communists to raise the country’s educational level, improve its administration, renovate its economy and spread the doctrines of communism. But not even Lenin saw the NEP as permanently acceptable.¹

And there was huge tension between what the communist party wanted for society and what the various social groups — classes, nationalities, organizations, churches and families — wanted for themselves. Most Bolshevik leaders had never liked the NEP, regarding it at best as an excrescent boil on the body politic and at worst a malignant cancer. They detested the reintroduction of capitalism and feared the rise of a new urban and rural bourgeoisie. They resented the corrupt, inefficient administration they headed; they disliked such national, religious and cultural concessions as they had had to make. They were embarrassed that they had not yet eliminated the poverty in Soviet towns and villages. They yearned to accelerate educational expansion and indoctrinate the working class with their ideas. They wanted a society wholly industrialized and equipped with technological dynamism. They desired to match the military preparedness of capitalist powers.

What is more, Lenin’s NEP had always disconcerted many central and local party leaders. His chief early opponent behind the scenes was Trotski. The disagreement between them related not to the basic immediate need for the NEP but to its scope and duration. Lenin wanted large-scale industry, banking and foreign trade to remain in Sovnarkom’s hands and ensured that this was achieved. This was not enough for Trotski, who urged that there should be an increase in the proportion of investment in industry and that the State Planning Commission (Gosplan) should draw up a single ‘plan’ for all sectors of the economy; and although he did not expressly demand a debate on the timing of the eventual phasing out of the NEP, his impatience with the policy evoked sympathy even among those communists who were suspicious of Trotski’s personal ambitions.

Lenin secretly arranged for Stalin and other associates to face down Trotski at the Eleventh Party Congress in March 1922.² Yet Lenin himself was ailing; and the Central Committee, on the advice of Molotov and Bukharin, insisted that he should reduce his political activity. In the winter of 1921–2 he was residing at a sanatorium in Gorki, thirty-five kilometres from the capital, while he recuperated from chronic severe headaches and insomnia. In May 1922, however, he suffered a major stroke and his influence upon politics diminished as his colleagues began to run the party and government without him.

He continued to read Pravda; he also ordered the fitting of a direct telephone line to the Kremlin.³ Stalin, too, kept him informed about events by coming out to visit him. With Lenin’s approval, Stalin had become Party General Secretary after the Eleventh Congress and knew better than anyone what was happening in the Politburo, Orgburo and the Secretariat. Lenin looked forward to Stalin’s visits, ordering that a bottle of wine should be opened for him.⁴ And yet the friendliness did not last long. The constitutional question about what kind of federation should be created out of the RSFSR and the other Soviet republics flared up in summer 1922, and found Lenin and Stalin at odds. Stalin also infuriated Lenin by countenancing the abolition of the state monopoly over foreign trade as well as by running the central party apparatus in an authoritarian manner. Now perceiving Trotski as the lesser of two evils, Lenin turned to him for help in reversing the movement of policy in a Politburo controlled by Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev.

On foreign trade Trotski won the Central Committee discussion in mid-December 1922, as Lenin remarked, ‘without having to fire a shot’.⁵ Lenin also began to have success in his controversy with Stalin over the USSR Constitution. But his own ill-health made it highly likely that his campaign might not be brought to a successful conclusion before he died. In late December 1922, despairing of his own medical recovery, he dictated a series of confidential documents that became known as his political testament. The intention was that the materials would be presented to the next Party Congress, enabling it to incorporate his ideas in strategic policies.

He had always behaved as if his own presence was vital to the cause of the October Revolution; his testament highlighted this when he drew pen-portraits of six leading Bolsheviks: Stalin, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Pyatakov, Bukharin and Trotski. Not one of them — not even his newly-found ally Trotski — emerged without severe criticism.⁶ The implication was plain: no other colleague by himelf was fit to become supreme leader. Lenin sensed that Bolshevism’s fate depended to a considerable extent on whether Stalin and Trotski would work harmoniously together. Hoping that a collective leadership would remain in place after his own demise, he argued that an influx of ordinary factory-workers to the Party Central Committee, the Party Central Control Commission and the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate would prevent a split in the Politburo and eradicate bureaucracy in both the party and the state as a whole.

In January 1923 Lenin dictated an addendum to his testament, to the effect that Stalin was too crude to be retained as the Party General Secretary.⁷ Lenin had learned that Stalin had covered up an incident in which Sergo Ordzhonikidze had beaten up a Georgian Bolshevik who opposed the line taken by Stalin and Ordzhonikidze on the USSR Constitution. Lenin had also discovered from his wife Nadezhda Krupskaya that Stalin had subjected her to verbal abuse on hearing that she had broken the regime of Lenin’s medical treatment by speaking to him about politics.

Yet Lenin’s health had to hold out if he was to bring down the General Secretary. On 5 March 1923 he wrote to Stalin that unless an apology was offered to Krupskaya, he would break personal relations with him.⁸ It was all too late. On 6 March, Lenin suffered another major stroke. This time he lost the use of the right side of his body and could neither speak nor read. In subsequent months he made little recovery and was confined to a wheel-chair as he struggled to recover his health. His wife Nadezhda and sister Maria nursed him attentively; but the end could not long be delayed. On 21 January 1924 his head throbbed unbearably, and his temperature shot up. At 6.50 p.m. he let out a great sigh, his body shuddered and then all was silence. The leader of the October Revolution, the Bolshevik party and the Communist International was dead.

There was no disruption of politics since the Politburo had long been preparing itself for Lenin’s death. Since Trotski was recuperating from illness in Abkhazia at the time, it was Stalin who headed the funeral commission. Instead of burying him, the Politburo ordered that Lenin should be embalmed and put on display in a mausoleum to be built on Red Square. Stalin claimed that this corresponded to the demands of ordinary workers; but the real motive seems to have been a wish to exploit the traditional belief of the Russian Orthodox Church that the remains of truly holy men did not putrefy (even though the Church did not go as far as displaying the corpses in glass cabinets⁹). A secular cult of Saint Vladimir of the October Revolution was being organized. Krupskaya, despite being disgusted, was powerless to oppose it.

The NEP had increased popular affection for Lenin; and the members of the Politburo were hoping to benefit from his reputation by identifying themselves closely with him and his policies. Arrangements were made for factory hooters to be sounded and for all traffic to be halted at the time of his funeral. Despite the bitter cold, a great crowd turned out for the speeches delivered by Lenin’s colleagues on Red Square. The display of reverence for him became mandatory and any past disagreements with him were discreetly overlooked. Bukharin, Dzierżyński, Kamenev, Preobrazhenski, Stalin, Trotski and Zinoviev had each clashed with him in the past. None of them was merely his cipher. As his body was being laid out under glass, a competition took place as to who should be recognized as the authentic heir to his political legacy.

Oaths were sworn to his memory and picture-books of his exploits appeared in large print-runs. An Institute of the Brain was founded where 30,000 slices were made of his cerebral tissue by researchers seeking the origins of his ‘genius’. His main works were published under Kamenev’s editorship while rarer pieces of Leniniana were prepared for a series of volumes entitled the Lenin Collection.¹⁰ Petrograd was renamed Leningrad in his honour. On a more practical level, Stalin insisted that homage to Lenin should be rendered by means of a mass enrolment of workers into the ranks of the Russian Communist Party, which in 1925 renamed itself the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks).

But what was Leninism? Lenin had eschewed giving a definition, affirming that Marxism required perpetual adjustment to changing circumstances. But his successors needed to explain what essential ideology they propounded in his name. The principal rivals — Trotski, Zinoviev, Bukharin, Kamenev and Stalin — produced speeches, articles and booklets for this purpose in 1924. A new term emerged: Marxism-Leninism. (There were still clumsier neologisms such as Marksovo-Engelso-Leninism; but Marxism-Leninism was clumsy enough: it was as if Mohammed had chosen to nominate his doctrines as Christianity-Islam.) The contenders for the succession announced their commitment to every idea associated with Lenin: the dictatorship of the proletariat; violence as the midwife of revolutionary transformation; hierarchy, discipline and centralism; concessions to peasants and oppressed nationalities; the incontrovertibility of Marxism; and the inevitability of world revolution.

Each Bolshevik leader believed in the one-party state, the one-ideology state, in legalized arbitrary rule and in terror as acceptable methods of governance, in administrative ultra-centralism, in philosophical amoralism. Neither Lenin nor any of the others used this terminology, but their words and deeds demonstrated their commitment. The speculation that if only Lenin had survived, a humanitarian order would have been established is hard to square with this gamut of agreed principles of Bolshevism.

The differences with Lenin’s oeuvre touched only on secondary matters. Trotski wished to expand state planning, accelerate industrialization and instigate revolution in Europe. Zinoviev objected to the indulgence shown to richer peasants. Kamenev agreed with Zinoviev, and continued to try to moderate the regime’s authoritarian excesses. Bukharin aspired to the creation of a distinctly ‘proletarian’ culture (whereas Lenin wanted cultural policy to be focused on traditional goals such as literacy and numeracy).¹¹ Intellectual and personal factors were entangled because several Politburo members were engaged in a struggle to show who was the fittest to don Lenin’s mantle. Although Zinoviev and Kamenev had joined hands with Stalin to prevent Trotski from succeeding Lenin, by summer 1923 they were also worrying about Stalin; and they conferred with Bukharin and even Stalin’s associates Ordzhonikidze and Voroshilov in the north Caucasian spa of Kislovodsk as to how best to reduce Stalin’s powers.

They might eventually have achieved their purpose had Trotski not picked that moment to challenge the wisdom of the Politburo’s handling of the economy. Fear of Trotski continued to be greater than annoyance with Stalin; and Kamenev, Zinoviev and Bukharin put aside their differences with Stalin in order to repel Trotski’s attack.

Economically it appeared that the NEP had succeeded beyond everyone’s expectations. Agricultural output in 1922 had risen enough for the Politburo to resume the export of grain. As trade between town and countryside increased, output recovered. By 1923, cereal production had increased by twenty-three per cent over the total recorded for 1920. Domestic industrial recovery also gathered pace: in the same three years output from factories rose by 184 per cent.¹² The snag was that, as Trotski memorably put it, a ‘scissors’ crisis’ divided the economy’s urban and rural sectors. For by 1923, the retail prices of industrial goods were three times greater than they had been in relation to agricultural goods back in 1913. The state’s pricing policy had turned the terms of trade against the peasantry, which responded by refraining from bringing its wheat, potatoes and milk to the towns. The two scissor blades of the economy had opened and the NEP was put at risk.

The fault lay not with market pressures but with the decisions of politicians, and Trotski teased the ascendant central leadership for its incompetence. Many on the left of the communist party welcomed Trotski’s decision to speak his mind. In October 1923 Preobrazhenski and others signed a Platform of the Forty-Six criticizing the Politburo and demanding an increase in central state economic planning and internal party democracy. They were not a monolithic group: most of them insisted on appending their own reservations about the document.¹³ Trotski made arguments similar to those of the Platform in The New Course, published in December. It was his contention that the stifling of democracy in the party had led to a bureaucratization of party life. Debate and administration had become inflexible. The erroneous decisions on the prices of industrial goods were supposedly one of the results.

Zinoviev, Stalin, Kamenev and Bukharin counter-attacked. They rebutted the charge of mismanagement and authoritarianism and argued that Trotski had been an anti-Leninist since the Second Party Congress in 1903. Trotski’s proposal for more rapid industrialization, they declared, would involve a fiscal bias against the peasantry. At the Thirteenth Party Conference in January 1924 they accused him of wishing to destroy Lenin’s NEP. ‘Trotskyism’ overnight became a heresy. By the mid-1920s, moreover, Bukharin had concluded that further steps in the ‘transition to socialism’ in Russia were unachievable by mainly violent means. The October Revolution and Civil War had been necessary ‘revolutionary’ phases, but the party ought presently to devote itself to an ‘evolutionary’ phase. The objective, according to Bukharin, should be civil peace and a gradual ‘growing into socialism’. He was enraptured by the NEP, urging that the Bolshevik philosophical and political antagonism to private profit should temporarily be abandoned. To the peasantry Bukharin declared: ‘Enrich yourselves!’

This imperative clashed so blatantly with the party’s basic ideology that Bukharin had to retract his words; and it was Stalin who supplied a doctrine capable of competing with the Left’s criticisms. In December 1924 he announced that it was a perfectly respectable tenet of Leninism that the party could complete the building of ‘Socialism in One Country’. This was a misinterpretation of Lenin; but it was a clever political move at the time. Trotski’s appeal to Bolshevik functionaries in the party, the Komsomol, the armed forces and the security police derived in part from his urgent will to industrialize the USSR and create a socialist society. Stalin’s doctrinal contribution reflected his long-held opinion that Europe was not yet ‘pregnant with socialist revolution’; and he maintained that Trotski’s insistence on the need for fraternal revolutions in the West underestimated the Soviet Union’s indigenous revolutionary potential. Stalin, by talking up the achievability of socialism without Trotskyist policies, was offering an encouraging alternative.

As Stalin began to add an ideological dimension to his bureaucratic authority, he was also contriving to clear his name of the taint applied to it by the deceased Lenin. At the Twelfth Party Congress in April 1923 Stalin leant on Kamenev and Zinoviev, who still preferred Stalin to Trotski, to restrict knowledge of Lenin’s political testament to the leaders of provincial delegations.

He worked hard to win the confidence of such leaders and their fellow committee-men, putting aside time at Congresses and in his Secretariat office to converse with them. Yet abrasiveness, too, remained part of his style when he attacked oppositionists. His language was sarcastic, repetitious and aggressive; his arguments were uncompromising and schematic. At the Party Conference in January 1924 it had been he who had lined up the speakers for the assault upon Trotski, Preobrazhenski and the so-called Left Opposition. Stalin’s ability to run the Secretariat was well attested; the surprise for his rivals, inside and outside the Left Opposition, was his talent at marshalling the entire party. He personified the practicality of those Bolsheviks who had not gone into emigration before 1917; and his recent military experience increased his image as a no-nonsense leader.

Stalin stressed that the party was the institutional cornerstone of the October Revolution. This had been Lenin’s attitude in practice, but not in his theoretical works. Stalin gave a series of lectures in 1924 on The Foundations of Leninism that gave expression to this.¹⁴ As General Secretary he derived advantage from the absolutizing of the communist party’s authority and prestige. Yet this served to aggravate again the worries of Kamenev and Zinoviev. Kamenev was Moscow Soviet chairman and Zinoviev headed both the Comintern and the Bolshevik party organization of Leningrad. They were unreconciled to seeing Stalin as their equal, and continued to despise his intellectual capacity. The rumour that Stalin had plagiarized material from F. A. Ksenofontov in order to complete The Foundations of Leninism was grist to the mill of their condescension.¹⁵ Now that Trotski had been pulled off his pedestal, Stalin had exhausted his usefulness to them; it was time to jettison him.

The struggle intensified in the ascendant party leadership about the nature of the NEP. Bukharin and Zinoviev, despite advocating measures at home that were substantially to the right of Trotski’s, were adventuristic in foreign affairs. Not only had they prompted the abortive March Action in Berlin in 1921, but also Zinoviev had compounded the blunder by impelling the Communist Party of Germany to make a further ill-judged attempt to seize power in November 1923. This attitude sat uncomfortably alongside Stalin’s wish to concentrate on the building of socialism in the USSR.

The issues were not clear cut. Bukharin and Zinoviev, while itching to instigate revolution in Berlin, wanted to negotiate with Western capitalist powers. After signing the trade treaties with the United Kingdom and other countries in 1921, the Politburo aimed to insert itself in European diplomacy on a normal basis. The first opportunity came with the Genoa Conference in March 1922. Under Lenin’s guidance, the Soviet negotiators were not too ambitious. Lenin had given up hoping for diplomatic recognition by the Allies as long as the French government demanded the de-annulment of the loans to Russia made by French investors before the October Revolution. People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs Georgi Chicherin was instructed to seek a separate deal with Germany. And so the two pariah powers after the Great War got together. They agreed, at the Italian resort of Rapallo, to grant diplomatic recognition to each other and to boost mutual trade; and, in a secret arrangement, the Soviet authorities were to help Germany to obviate the Treaty of Versailles’s restrictions on German military reconstruction by setting up armaments factories and military training facilities in the USSR.¹⁶

The Rapallo Treaty fitted with Lenin’s notion that economic reconstruction required foreign participation. But German generals proved more willing partners than German industrialists. Lenin’s scheme for ‘concessions’ to be used to attract capital from abroad was a miserable failure. Only roughly a hundred agreements were in operation before the end of 1927.¹⁷ Insofar as Europe and North America contributed to the Soviet Union’s economic regeneration, it occurred largely through international trade. But the slump in the price of grain on the world market meant that revenues had to be obtained mainly by sales of oil, timber and gold; and in the financial year 1926–7 the USSR’s exports were merely a third in volume of what they had been in 1913.¹⁸

Bukharin by the mid-1920s had come over to Stalin’s opinion that capitalism was not yet on the verge of revolutionary upheaval. The intellectual and political complications of the discussion were considerable. Trotski, despite castigating Stalin’s ideas about ‘Socialism in One Country’, recognized the stabilization of capitalism as a medium-term fact of life.¹⁹ In criticizing the March Action of 1921 and the Berlin insurrection of November 1923, he was scoffing at the Politburo’s incompetence rather than its zeal to spread revolution; and his ridicule was focused upon Zinoviev, whom he described as trying to compensate for his opposition to Lenin’s seizure of power in Russia in October 1917 with an ultra-revolutionary strategy for Germany in the 1920s. Bukharin and Stalin replied to Trotski that their own quiescence in foreign policy by 1924 had yielded an improvement in the USSR’s security. A Soviet-Chinese treaty was signed in the same year and relations with Japan remained peaceful. The Labour Party won the British elections and gave de jure recognition to the Soviet government.

This bolstered the Politburo’s case for concentrating upon economic recovery. A further adjustment of the NEP seemed desirable in order to boost agricultural output, and Gosplan and the various People’s Commissariats were ordered to draft appropriate legislation. After a wide-ranging discussion, it was decided in April 1925 to lower the burden of the food tax, to diminish fiscal discrimination against better-off peasants, and to legalize hired labour and the leasing of land.

Yet the Politburo’s unity was under strain. Zinoviev and Kamenev asserted that excessive compromise had been made with the aspirations of the peasantry. Bukharin stepped forward with a defiant riposte. At the Fourteenth Party Congress in December 1925 he declared: ‘We shall move forward at a snail’s pace, but none the less we shall be building socialism, and we shall build it.’ Throughout the year Trotski had watched bemused as Zinoviev and Kamenev built up the case against official party policy. Zinoviev had a firm organizational base in Leningrad and assumed he was too strong for Stalin; but the Politburo majority were on the side of Stalin and Bukharin, and in 1926 Stalin’s associate Sergei Kirov was appointed to the party first secretaryship in Leningrad. Zinoviev and his Leningrad Opposition saw the writing on the wall. Overtures were made by Zinoviev to his arch-enemy Trotski, and from the summer a United Opposition — led by Trotski, Zinoviev and Kamenev — confronted the ascendant party leadership.

The United Opposition maintained that Stalin and Bukharin had surrendered entirely to the peasantry. This was not very plausible. In August 1925 Gosplan took a major step towards comprehensive state planning by issuing its ‘control figures for the national economy’. At the Fourteenth Congress in December, moreover, industrial capital goods were made the priority for longer-term state investment. The Central Committee repeated the point in April 1926, making a general call for ‘the reinforcement of the planning principle and the introduction of planning discipline’.²⁰ Two campaigns were inaugurated in industry. First came a ‘Regime of Economy’, then a ‘Rationalization of Production’. Both campaigns were a means of putting pressure upon factories to cut out inefficient methods and to raise levels of productivity.

The USSR’s industrialization was never far from the Politburo’s thoughts. The United Opposition, for its part, was constantly on the defensive. Stalin sliced away at their power-bases as the Secretariat replaced opponents with loyalists at all levels of the party’s hierarchy; Bukharin had a merry time reviling his leading critics in books and articles. The United Opposition’s access to the public media was continually reduced. Prolific writers such as Trotski, Radek, Preobrazhenski, Kamenev and Zinoviev had their material rejected for publication in Pravda. Claques were organized at Party Congresses to interrupt their speeches. In January 1925 Trotski was removed as People’s Commissar for Military Affairs, and in December he lost his Politburo seat. Zinoviev was sacked as Leningrad Soviet chairman in January 1926 and in July was ousted from the Politburo with Kamenev. In October 1926 the leadership of the Executive Committee of the Comintern passed from Zinoviev to Dmitri Manuilski.

The United Opposition leaders fell back on their experience as clandestine party activists against the Romanov monarchy. They produced programmes, theses and appeals on primitive printing devices, keeping an eye open for potential OGPU informers. They also arranged unexpected mass meetings where they could communicate their ideas to workers. They talked to sympathizers in the Comintern. They would not go gently into oblivion.

Yet although the Left Opposition, the Leningrad Opposition and the United Opposition exposed the absence of internal party democracy, their words had a hollow ring. Trotski and Zinoviev had treated Bolshevik dissidents with disdain until they, too, fell out with the Politburo. Their invective against authoritarianism and bureaucracy seemed self-serving to the Workers’ Opposition, which refused to co-operate with them. In any case, no communist party critic of the Politburo — from Shlyapnikov through to Trotski — called for the introduction of general democracy. The critics wanted elections and open discussion in the party and, to some extent, in the soviets and the trade unions. But none favoured permitting the Mensheviks, Socialist-Revolutionaries and Kadets to re-enter politics. The All-Union Communist Party’s monopoly, while having no sanction even from the USSR Constitution, was an unchallenged tenet; and oppositionists went out of their way to affirm their obedience to the party. Even Trotski, that remarkable individualist, demurred at being thought disloyal.

Such self-abnegation did him no good: Stalin was out to get the United Opposition and the OGPU smashed their printing facilities and broke up their meetings. Stalin’s wish to settle accounts with Trotski and Zinoviev was reinforced by the débâcles in international relations. In May 1927 a massacre of thousands of Chinese communists was perpetrated by Chiang Kai-shek in Shanghai. The Soviet Politburo had pushed the Chinese Communist Party into alliance with Chiang, and Trotski did not fail to point out that foreign policy was unsafe in the hands of the existing Politburo.

This time Stalin had his way: in November 1927 the Central Committee expelled Trotski, Kamenev and Zinoviev from the party. Hundreds of their followers were treated similarly. Kamenev and Zinoviev were so demoralized that they petitioned in January 1928 for re-admittance to the party. They recanted their opinions, which they now described as anti-Leninist. In return Stalin re-admitted them to the party in June. Trotski refused to recant. He and thirty unrepentant oppositionists, including Preobrazhenski, were sent into internal exile. Trotski found himself isolated in Alma-Ata, 3000 kilometres from Moscow. He was not physically abused, and took his family, secretaries and personal library with him; he was also allowed to write to his associates elsewhere in the USSR. But the activity of the United Opposition was in tatters, and Pyatakov and V. A. Antonov-Ovseenko were so impressed by Stalin’s industrializing drive that they decided to break with Trotski on the same terms as Kamenev and Zinoviev.

Victory for Stalin and Bukharin was completed by the winter of 1927–8. The NEP had apparently been secured for several more years and the Politburo seemed to be made up of nine men who gave no sign of serious divisions among themselves. Their record of achievement, furthermore, was substantial. The statistics are controversial, but there seems little doubt that the output of both industry and agriculture was roughly what it had been in the last year before the Great War. Economic recovery had more or less been achieved.²¹

And the skewing of official policy since 1925 had led to a re-attainment of the late tsarist period’s proportion of industrial production reinvested in factories and mines. The NEP was showing itself able not merely to restore industry but also to develop it further. The engineering sub-sector, which was almost wholly state-owned, had already been expanded beyond its pre-war capacity. But private small-scale and handicrafts output also increased: by 1926–7 it was only slightly less than in 1913. Later computations have suggested that an annual growth of six per cent in production from Soviet factories and mines was possible within the parameters of the NEP.²² The villages, too, displayed renewed liveliness. Agriculture was undergoing diversification. Under Nicholas II about ninety per cent of the sown area was given over to cereal crops; by the end of the 1920s the percentage had fallen to eighty-two. Emphasis was placed, too, upon sugar beet, potatoes and cotton; and horse-drawn equipment was also on the increase.²³

The Politburo could take satisfaction inasmuch as this was achieved in the teeth of hostility from the capitalist world. Direct foreign investment, which had been crucial to the pre-revolutionary economy, had vanished: the Soviet authorities had to pay punctiliously for every piece of machinery they brought into the country. Even if they had not refused to honour the loans contracted by Nicholas II and the Provisional Government, the October Revolution would always have stood as a disincentive to foreign banks and industrial companies to return to Russia.

The central party leadership did not recognize its own successes as such, but brooded upon the patchiness of economic advance. It was also jolted by difficulties which were of its own making. In 1926 the party’s leaders had introduced large surcharges on goods carried by rail for private commerce; they had also imposed a tax on super-profits accruing to nepmen. Article No. 107 had been added to the USSR Criminal Code, specifying three years’ imprisonment for price rises found to be ‘evil-intentioned’.²⁴ In the tax year 1926–7 the state aimed to maximize revenues for industrial investment by reducing by six per cent the prices it paid for agricultural produce. In the case of grain, the reduction was by 20–25 per cent.²⁵ Simultaneously the state sought to show goodwill to agriculture by lowering the prices for goods produced by state-owned enterprises. The effect was disastrous. Nepmen became more elusive to the tax-collecting agencies than previously. Peasants refused to release their stocks to the state procurement bodies — and even the lowered industrial prices failed to entice them since factory goods were in exceedingly short supply after their prices had been lowered and they had been bought up by middlemen.

These measures were fatal for the policy inaugurated by Lenin in 1921. By the last three months of 1927 there was a drastic shortage of food for the towns as state purchases of grain dropped to a half of the amount obtained in the same period in the previous year. Among the reasons for the mismanagement was the ascendant party leaders’ ignorance of market economics. Another was their wish to be seen to have a strategy different from the United Opposition’s. Trotski was calling for the raising of industrial prices, and so the Politburo obtusely lowered them. Such particularities had an influence on the situation.

Nevertheless they were not in themselves sufficient to induce the NEP’s abandonment. Although there was a collapse in the amount of grain marketed to the state, no serious crop shortage existed in the country: indeed the harvests of 1926–7 were only five per cent down on the best harvest recorded before the First World War. But whereas Bukharin was willing to raise the prices offered by the state for agricultural produce, Stalin was hostile to such compromise. Stalin’s attitude was reinforced by the basic difficulties experienced by the party earlier in the decade. The national and religious resurgence; the administrative malaise; poverty, ill-health and illiteracy; urban unemployment; military insecurity; problems in industrial production; the spread of political apathy; the isolation of the party from most sections of society: all these difficulties prepared the ground for Stalin to decide that the moment was overdue for a break with the NEP.

The alliance of Stalin and Bukharin had been the cardinal political relationship in the defeat of successive challenges to the ascendant party leadership. With help from Zinoviev and Kamenev, Stalin and Bukharin had defeated Trotski and the Left Opposition. Together they had proceeded to crush the United Opposition of Trotski, Zinoviev and Kamenev. They seemed a formidable, unbreakable duumvirate. But disagreements on food-supplies policy started to divide them. And whatever was done about this policy would inevitably deeply affect all other policies. The USSR was entering another political maelstrom.