The Russian Revolution

12

Building the One-Party State

On October 26, 1917, the Bolsheviks did not so much seize power over Russia as stake a claim to it. On that day they won from a rump Congress of Soviets, which they had convened in an unlawful manner and packed with adherents, only limited and temporary authority: the authority to form yet another Provisional Government. That government was to be accountable to the Central Executive Committee of the Soviet Congress and retire in a month, upon the convocation of the Constituent Assembly. It took them three years of civil war to make good this claim. Notwithstanding their precarious position, they proceeded almost at once to lay the foundations of a type of regime unknown to history, a one-party dictatorship.

On October 26, the Bolsheviks had a choice of three options. They could have declared their party to be the government. They could have dissolved the party in the government. And they could have kept party and government as separate institutions, and either directed the state from the outside or else meshed with it on the executive level, through interlocking personnel.¹ For reasons that will be spelled out, Lenin rejected the first and second of these alternatives. He hesitated briefly between the two variants of option three. Initially, he leaned toward variant one: rather than head the state, he preferred to govern as head of the party, which he saw as the incipient government of the world proletariat. But, as we have seen, his associates thought he was trying to evade responsibility for the October coup, which many of them had opposed, and forced him to give it up as well.² As a result, in the political system that came into being within hours of the coup d’état, party and state retained distinctive identities, meshing not institutionally but personally on the executive levels, first of all in the cabinet (Council of People’s Commissars or Sovnarkom) in which the leaders of the party took all the ministerial posts. Under this arrangement, the Bolsheviks, as party officials, made policy decisions and executed them as heads of the state departments, using for this purpose the bureaucracy and the security police.

Such was the origin of a type of government that was to breed numerous offspring in the form of left and right one-party dictatorships in Europe and the rest of the world, and emerge as the main enemy of and alternative to parliamentary democracy. Its distinguishing quality was the concentration of executive and legislative authority, as well as the power to make all legislative, executive, and judiciary appointments in the hands of a private association, the “ruling party.” Given that the Bolsheviks quickly outlawed all the other parties, the name “party” hardly applied to their organization. A “party”—the term derives from the Latin pars, or part—by definition cannot be exclusive, since a part cannot be the whole: a “one-party state” is, therefore, a contradiction in terms.³ The term that fits it somewhat better is “dual state,” coined later to describe a similar regime established in Germany by Hitler.⁴

This type of government had only one precedent, an imperfect and only partially realized one, on which it was in some measure modeled, namely the Jacobin regime of Revolutionary France. The hundreds of Jacobin clubs scattered throughout France, were not, strictly speaking, a party, but they did acquire many of its characteristics even before the Jacobins came to power: membership in them was strictly controlled, requiring adherence to a program as well as bloc voting, and the Paris Jacobin Club acted as their national center. From the fall of 1793 until the Thermidorean coup a year later, the Jacobin clubs, without formally meshing with the administration, seized the reins of government by monopolizing all executive positions and arrogating to themselves the power to veto government policies.⁵ Had the Jacobins stayed in power longer, they might well have produced a genuine one-party state. As it was, they provided a prototype which the Bolsheviks, leaning on Russia’s autocratic traditions, brought to perfection.

The Bolsheviks had never given much thought to the state that would come into being after they made the revolution, because they took it for granted that their revolution would instantly ignite the entire world and sweep away national governments. They improvised the one-party state as they went along, and although they never managed to provide it with a theoretical foundation, it proved to be the most enduring and influential of their accomplishments.

While he never doubted he would exercise unlimited power, Lenin had to make allowance for the fact that he had taken power in the name of “Soviet democracy.” The Bolsheviks, it will be recalled, had carried out the coup d’état not on their own behalf—their party’s name did not appear on any of the proclamations of the Military-Revolutionary Committee—but on that of the soviets. Their slogan had been “All Power to the Soviets”; their authority was conditional and provisional. The fiction had to be maintained for a time because the country would not have tolerated any one party arrogating to itself a monopoly of power.

Even the delegates to the Second Congress of Soviets, which the Bolsheviks had packed with adherents and sympathizers, did not intend to invest the Bolshevik leadership with dictatorial prerogatives. The delegates to the gathering which the Bolsheviks have ever since claimed as the source of legitimacy, when polled on how the soviets which they represented wished to reconstruct political authority, responded as follows:⁶

All power to the soviets

505

(75%)

All power to democracy

86

(13%)

All power to democracy but without Kadets

21

(3%)

A coalition government

58

(8.6%)

No answer

3

(0.4%)

The responses said more or less the same thing: that if the pro-Bolshevik soviets did not know precisely what kind of government they wanted, none of them envisaged any single party enjoying a political monopoly. Indeed, many of Lenin’s closest associates also opposed excluding other socialist parties from the Soviet Government, and would resign in protest because Lenin and a handful of his most devoted followers (Trotsky, Stalin, Feliks Dzerzhinskii) insisted on such a course. This was the political reality that Lenin had to face. It forced him to continue hiding behind the façade of “soviet power” even as he was putting in place a one-party dictatorship. The overwhelmingly democratic and socialist sentiment of the population, imprecisely articulated but intensely felt, compelled him to keep intact the structure of the state in the guise of its new nominal “sovereign,” the soviets, while accumulating all the strands of power in his own hands.

But there are good reasons why, even if the mood of the country had not forced him to perpetuate the deception, Lenin would have preferred to govern through the the state and keep the party separate from it. One factor was the shortage of Bolshevik personnel. Administering Russia under normal conditions required hundreds of thousands of functionaries, public and private. To administer a country in which all forms of self-government were to be extinguished and the economy nationalized, required many times that number. The Bolshevik Party in 1917–18 was much too small to cope with this task; in any event, very few of its adherents, most of them lifelong professional revolutionaries, had expertise in administration. The Bolsheviks had no choice, therefore, but to rely on the old bureaucratic apparatus and other “bourgeois specialists,” and rather than administer directly, control the administrators. Emulating the Jacobins, they insinuated Bolshevik personnel into commanding positions in all the institutions and organizations without exception—personnel who owed allegiance and obedience not to the state but to the party. The need for reliable party personnel was so acute that the party had to expand more rapidly than its leaders wished, enrolling careerists, pure and simple.

The third consideration in favor of keeping the party distinct from the state was that such a procedure protected it from domestic and foreign criticism. Since the Bolsheviks had no intention of yielding power even if the population overwhelmingly rejected them, they needed a scapegoat. This was to be the state bureaucracy, which could be blamed for failures while the party maintained the pretense of infallibility. In carrying abroad subversive activities, the Bolsheviks would dispose of foreign protests by claiming that these were the work of the Russian Communist Party, a “private organization” for which the Soviet Government could not be held responsible.

The establishment in Russia of a one-party state required a variety of measures, destructive as well as constructive. The process was substantially completed (in central Russia, which is all the Bolsheviks controlled at the time) by the autumn of 1918. Subsequently they transplanted these institutions and practices to the borderlands.

First and foremost, they had to uproot all that remained of the old regime, tsarist as well as “bourgeois” (democratic): the organs of self-government, the political parties and their press, the armed forces, the judiciary system, and the institution of private property. This purely destructive phase of the Revolution, carried out in fulfillment of Marx’s injunction of 1871 not to take over but “smash” the old order, was formalized by decrees but it was accomplished mainly by spontaneous anarchism, which the February Revolution had unleashed and the Bolsheviks had done their utmost to inflame. Contemporaries saw in this destructive work only mindless nihilism, but for the new rulers it was clearing the ground before the construction of the new political and social order could get underway.

Construction was the difficult part because it required that the Bolsheviks restrain the anarchistic instincts of the people and reimpose discipline from which the people thought the Revolution had freed them once and for all. It called for structuring the new authority (vlast’) in a manner that had the appearance of folkish, “soviet” democracy but actually restored Muscovite absolutism with all the refinements made possible by modern ideology and technology. The Bolshevik rulers saw it as their most urgent immediate task to free themselves from accountability to the soviets, their nominal sovereign. Next, they had to be rid of the Constituent Assembly, to the convocation of which they had committed themselves but which was certain to remove them from power. And finally, they had to transform the soviets into compliant tools of the party.

That the Bolshevik Party had to be de facto as well as de jure the engine driving the Soviet Government no Bolshevik ever questioned. Lenin merely uttered a truism when he said at the Tenth Party Congress in 1921: “Our party is the governmental party and the resolution which the Party Congress adopts will be obligatory for the entire republic.”⁷ A few years later Stalin defined even more explicitly the party’s constitutional primacy when he stated that “in our country not a single important political or organizational question is decided by our soviet and other mass organizations without guiding directions from the party.”⁸

And yet, for all its acknowledged public authority, the Bolshevik Party remained after 1917 what it had been before—namely, a private body. Neither the Soviet Constitution of 1918 nor that of 1924 made any reference to it. The party was first mentioned in a constitutional document in the so-called Stalin Constitution of 1936, Article 126 of which described it as “the vanguard of the toilers in their struggle for the strengthening and development of the socialist order” and the “leading core of all the organizations of toilers, social as well as governmental.” To ignore in legislation the most essential was very much in the Russian tradition: after all, tsarist absolutism found its first and rather casual definition in Peter the Great’s “Military Regulation” more than two centuries after it had become the country’s central political reality, and serfdom, its basic social reality, never received legal acknowledgment. Until 1936, the party depicted itself as a transcendental force which guided the country by example and inspiration. Thus, the program, adopted in March 1919, defined its role as “organizing” and “leading” the proletariat, and “explaining” to it the nature of the class struggle, without once alluding to the fact that it also ruled the “proletariat” as it did all else. Anyone who drew his knowledge of Soviet Russia exclusively from official documents of the time would have no inkling of the party’s involvement in the day-to-day life of the country, although that was what distinguished the Soviet Union from every other country in the world.*

Thus, after the power seizure the Bolshevik Party retained its private character even though it had in the meantime become the complete master of state and society. As a result, its statutes, procedures, decisions, and personnel were subject to no external supervision. Its 600,000 to 700,000 members, who, according to Kamenev’s statement made in 1920, “governed” a Russia composed overwhelmingly of non-Bolsheviks,⁹ resembled an elite cohort rather than a political party.† While nothing escaped its control, the party acknowledged no control over itself: it was self-contained and self-accountable. This created an anomalous situation that Communist theorists have never been able to explain satisfactorily, since it can only be done—if it can be done at all—with reference to such metaphysical concepts as Rousseau’s “general will,” said by him to express everyone’s will and yet to be somehow distinct from the “will of all.”

The rolls of the party grew exponentially in the three years during which the Bolsheviks conquered Russia and placed their agents in charge of all the institutions. In February 1917 it had 23,600 members; in 1919, 250,000; in March 1921, 730,000 (including candidate members).¹⁰ Most of the newcomers joined as the Bolsheviks appeared to be winning the Civil War in order to qualify for the benefits traditionally associated in Russia with state service. During those years of extreme privation, a party card assured the minimum of housing, food, and fuel, as well as immunity from the political police for all but the most egregious crimes. Party members alone were allowed to carry weapons. Lenin, of course, realized that most of the newcomers were careerists and that their bribe-taking, thieving, and bullying brought nothing but harm to the party’s reputation; but his aspirations to total authority left him no choice but to enroll anyone with the proper social credentials and willingness to carry out orders without questions or inhibitions. At the same time, he made certain that key positions in the party and government were reserved for the “old guard,” veterans of the underground: as late as 1930, 69 percent of the secretaries of the central committees of the national republics and the regional (oblast’ and krai) committees had joined before the Revolution.¹¹

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

I become ever more convinced that Lenin never makes a mistake. In the end, he is always right. How many times it seemed that he had blundered, in his prognosis or political line—and always, in the end, his prognosis and his line turned out to have been correct.¹²

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

72. Iakov Sverdlov.

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

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

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

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

There were city soviets, village soviets, selo soviets, and suburban soviets. These soviets acknowledged no one but themselves, and if they did acknowledge, it was only “up to the point” that happened to have been advantageous to them. Every soviet lived and struggled as the immediate surrounding conditions dictated, and as it could and wanted to. They had no, or virtually no … bureaucratic soviet structures.¹⁶

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

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

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

We have always pointed out that the popularity of the slogan “All Power to the Soviets” among peasants and the backward segment of the working class can be in large measure explained by the fact that they invest this slogan with the primitive idea of the supremacy of local workers or local peasants over a given territory, much as they identify the slogan of worker control with the idea of seizure of a given factory and that of agrarian revolution with the idea of a given village appropriating a given estate.¹⁹

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’, and Peasants’ Deputies resolves: To constitute for the administration of the country prior to the convocation of the Constituent Assembly a Provisional Workers’ and Peasants’ Government to be known as the Council of People’s Commissars.… Control over the activity of the People’s Commissars and the right of replacing them is vested in the All-Russian Congress of Workers’, Soldiers’, and Peasants’ Deputies and its Central Executive Committee.²²

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

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

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

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

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

Any sense of relief the Bolsheviks may have received from this agreement vanished the next day when they learned that the union, supported by the socialist parties, had raised its stakes and now demanded that the Bolsheviks remove themselves from the government altogether. The Bolshevik Central Committee, still minus Lenin and Trotsky, spent most of the day discussing this demand. It did so in a highly charged atmosphere, for the pro-Kerensky forces under Ataman Krasnov were expected to break into the city at any moment. Seeking to salvage something, Kamenev proposed a compromise: Lenin would resign the chairmanship of the Sovnarkom in favor of the SR leader Victor Chernov, and the Bolsheviks would accept secondary portfolios in a coalition government dominated by SRs and Mensheviks.²⁶

It is difficult to tell what would have become of these concessions were it not that late that evening news arrived that Krasnov’s forces had been beaten back.

The military threat lifted, Lenin and Trotsky now turned their attention to the catastrophic political situation created by the “capitulationist” policy of the Central Committee. When the committee reconvened on the evening of November 1, Lenin exploded with uncontrolled fury.²⁷ “Kamenev’s policy,” he demanded, “must be stopped at once.” The committee should have carried out negotiations with the union as “diplomatic camouflage for military action”—that is, presumably not in good faith, but only to secure its assistance against Kerensky’s troops. The majority of the Central Committee was unmoved: Rykov ventured the opinion that the Bolsheviks would not be able to keep power. A vote was taken: ten members favored continuing the talks with the other socialist parties about a coalition government, and only three sided with Lenin (Trotsky, Sokolnikov, and probably Dzerzhinskii). Even Sverdlov opposed Lenin.

Lenin faced a humiliating defeat: his comrades were prepared to throw away the fruits of the October victory, and instead of establishing a “proletarian dictatorship,” would share power as minor partners with “petty bourgeois” parties. He was saved by Trotsky, who intervened with a clever compromise. Trotsky began with a tirade against concessions:

We are told we are incapable of constructive work. But if this is the case, then we should simply turn power over to those who had been right in fighting us. In fact, we have already accomplished a great deal. It is impossible, we are told, to sit on bayonets. But without bayonets one cannot manage either.… This whole petty bourgeois scum which now is unable to side with either this or that side, once it learns that our authority is strong, will come over to us, [the union] included.… The petty bourgeois mass is looking for a force to which to submit.²⁸

As Alexandra liked to remind Nicholas: “Russia loves to feel the whip.”

Trotsky proposed a formula to gain time: negotiations over a coalition cabinet should continue with the Left SRs, the only party that accepted the October coup, but they should cease with the other socialist parties if no agreement was reached after one more attempt. This did not seem to be an unreasonable way out of the impasse and the proposal carried.

Lenin, determined to put an end to defeatism in his ranks, returned to the fray the next day with the demand that the Central Committee condemn the “opposition.” It was a strange demand, given that it was he who opposed the will of the majority. In the debates that ensued, he managed to split his rivals. A resolution condemning them won with a vote of 10–5. As a result, the five who stood up against Lenin to the end—Kamenev, Zinoviev, Rykov, Miliutin, and Nogin—resigned. On November 4, Izvestiia carried a letter in which they explained their action:

On November 1, the Central Committee … adopted a resolution which, in effect, rejected agreement with [other] parties in the Soviet for the purpose of forming a socialist Soviet Government.… We regard the formation of such a government essential to the prevention of further bloodshed.… The dominant group in the Central Committee has undertaken a number of acts which demonstrate clearly its firm determination not to allow the formation of a government made up of soviet parties and insists on a purely Bolshevik Government, no matter what the consequences and how many victims the workers and soldiers will have to sacrifice. We cannot assume responsibility for this fatal policy of the Central Committee, pursued in opposition to the will of the vast part of the proletariat and the troops.… On these grounds, we resign from the Central Committee so as to have the right to defend our point of view openly before the mass of workers and soldiers and to appeal to them to support our slogan: “Long live the government of soviet parties!”²⁹

Two days later, Kamenev resigned as chairman of the CEC; four People’s Commissars (out of eleven) did likewise: Nogin (Trade and Industry), Rykov (Interior), Miliutin (Agriculture), and Teodorovich (Supply). Shliapnikov, the Commissar for Labor, signed the letter but stayed on the job. Several Bolshevik lower-level commissars resigned as well. “We take the position,” the commissars’ letter read:

that it is necessary to form a socialist government of all the soviet parties. We believe that only the formation of such a government would make it possible to consolidate the results of the heroic struggle of the working class and the revolutionary army in the days of October–November. We believe that there is only one alternative to this: the maintenance of an exclusively Bolshevik Government by means of political terror. This is the path taken by the Council of People’s Commissars. We cannot and do not want to go this way. We see that this leads to the removal of mass proletarian organizations from the management of political life, to the establishment of an irresponsible regime, and to the destruction of the Revolution and the country. We cannot bear responsibility for this policy and therefore tender to the CEC our resignations as People’s Commissars.³⁰

Lenin lost no sleep over these protests and resignations, confident that the straying sheep would soon return to the fold, as indeed they did. Where else could they go? The socialist parties ostracized them; the liberals, should they take power, would put them in jail; while the politicians of the right would hang them. Their very physical survival depended on Lenin’s success.

The decisions adopted by the Bolshevik Central Committee signified that the Bolsheviks would share power only with parties that were prepared to accept a role of junior partner and rubber-stamp Bolshevik resolutions. Except for four months (December 1917–March 1918) when the Bolsheviks allowed a few Left SRs into their cabinet, the so-called Soviet Government never reflected the composition of the soviets: it was and remained a Bolshevik Government in soviet disguise.

Lenin had now managed to beat off the claims for a share of power by rival socialist parties, but he still had to cope with the insistence of the CEC that it was the soviet parliament to which his commissars owed responsibility.

The CEC which the Bolsheviks had handpicked in October thought of itself as a socialist Duma empowered to monitor the government’s actions, appoint the cabinet, and legislate.* The day after the coup, it proceeded to work out its statutes, providing for an elaborate structure of plenums, presidia, and commissions of all sorts. Lenin thought such parliamentary pretensions ridiculous. From the first day he ignored the CEC whether in appointing officials or in issuing decrees. This can be illustrated by the casual manner in which he elected the CEC’s new chairman. He decided that Sverdlov would be the best man to replace Kamenev. He had no reason to doubt that the CEC would approve his choice, but since he could not be absolutely certain, he bypassed it. He summoned Sverdlov: “Iakov Mikhailovich,” he said, “I would like you to become the chairman of the CEC: what do you say?” Apparently, Sverdlov said yes, for Lenin promised that after the Central Committee had approved the choice, he would be “carefully” voted in by the CEC’s Bolshevik majority. Lenin instructed him to count heads and make certain that the entire Bolshevik faction turned up for the vote.³¹ All went as planned, and on November 8, Sverdlov was “elected” by a vote of 19–14.* In this post, which he held until his death in March 1919, Sverdlov ensured that the CEC ratified all party decisions after perfunctory discussion.

Lenin similarly ignored the CEC in choosing replacements for the commissars who had resigned from the cabinet: these he handpicked on November 8–11 after casual consultation with associates but without asking the CEC’s approval.

He still faced the critical issue of the legislative authority of the CEC, its right to approve or veto government decrees.

In the first two weeks of the new regime, Chairman Kamenev had managed to insulate the Sovnarkom from the CEC by convoking it on short notice and failing to provide it beforehand with an agenda. During this brief interlude, the Sovnarkom legislated without bothering to obtain the CEC’s approval. Indeed, government procedures at the time were so lax that some Bolsheviks who were not even members of the cabinet issued decrees on their own initiative without informing the Sovnarkom, let alone the Soviet Executive. Two such decrees brought about a constitutional crisis. The first was the Decree on the Press, issued on October 27, the initial day of new government. It bore the signature of Lenin, although it had been drafted by Lunacharskii, almost certainly with Lenin’s encouragement and approval.† This remarkable document asserted that the “counterrevolutionary press”—a term which it did not define, but which obviously applied to all papers that did not acknowledge the legitimacy of the October coup—was causing harm, for which reason “temporary and emergency measures had to be taken to stop the torrent of filth and slander.” Newspapers that agitated against the new authority were to be closed. “As soon as the new order has been firmly established,” the decree went on, “all administrative measures affecting the press will be lifted [and] the press will be granted full freedom …”

The country had grown accustomed since February 1917 to violence against newspapers and printing plants. First, the “reactionary” press was attacked and closed; later, in July, the same fate befell Bolshevik organs. Once in power, the Bolsheviks expanded and formalized such practices. On October 26, the Military-Revolutionary Committee carried out pogroms of the oppositional press. It closed the uncompromisingly anti-Bolshevik Nashe obschee delo and arrested Vladimir Burtsev, its editor. It also suppressed the Menshevik Den’ the Kadet Rech’ the right-wing Novoe vremia, and the right-of-center Birzhevye vedomosti. The printing plants of Den’ and Rech’ were confiscated and turned over to Bolshevik journalists.³² Most of the suppressed dailies promptly reappeared under different names.

The Decree on the Press went much further: if enforced, it would have eliminated in Russia the independent press whose origins went back to the reign of Catherine II. The outrage was universal. In Moscow, the Bolshevik controlled Military-Revolutionary Committee went so far as to overrule it, declaring on November 21 that the emergency was over and the press once again could enjoy full freedom of expression.³³ In the CEC, the Bolshevik Iurii Larin denounced the decree and called for its revocation.³⁴ On November 26, 1917, the Union of Writers issued a one-time newspaper, Gazeta-Protest, in which some of Russia’s leading writers expressed anger at this unprecedented attempt to stifle freedom of expression. Vladimir Korolenko wrote that as he read Lenin’s ukaz “blood rushed to his face from shame and indignation”:

Who, by what right, has deprived me, as reader and member of the [Poltava] community, of the opportunity to learn what is happening in the capital city during these tragic moments? And who presumes to prevent me, as a writer, of the opportunity to express freely to my fellow citizens my views on these events without the censor’s imprimatur?³⁵

Anticipating that this and similar measures, especially those concerning the economy, would arouse strong opposition in the Congress of Soviets and the CEC, the Bolsheviks issued yet another law bearing on the question of relations between government and soviets. Called “Concerning the Procedure for the Ratification and Promulgation of Laws,” the decree claimed for the Sovnarkom the right to act in a legislative capacity: the CEC’s power was limited to ratifying or abrogating decrees after they had gone into effect. This document, which completely subverted the conditions under which the Congress of Soviets only a few days before had authorized the Bolsheviks to form a government, bore Lenin’s signature. But it is claimed in the recollections of Iurii Larin, a Menshevik who in September had gone over to Lenin and become his most influential economic adviser, that it was he who had drafted and issued it on his own authority without Lenin’s knowledge: Lenin is said to have learned of this law only when he read it in the official Gazette.³⁶

The Larin-Lenin decree claimed to have validity only until the convocation of the Constituent Assembly. It declared that until then laws would be drafted and promulgated by the Provisional Government of Workers and Peasants (Sovnarkom). The Central Executive Committee retained the right to “suspend, change, or annul” such laws retroactively.* With this decree, the Bolsheviks claimed the right to legislate by the equivalent of Article 87 of the Fundamental Laws of 1906.

This simplified procedure, which rid the government of parliamentary “obstructionism,” would have warmed the heart of Goremykin and any other conservative bureaucrat of the old regime, but it was not what the socialists had expected of the “Soviet” Government. The CEC followed these developments with growing alarm; it protested the Sovnarkom’s infringement of its authority through uncontrolled “bossing” (khoziaistvovanie) and the promulgation of decrees in the CEC’s name but without its approval.³⁷

The issue came to a head at a meeting of November 4 which decided the fate of “soviet democracy.” Lenin and Trotsky were invited to explain themselves, much as before the Revolution Imperial ministers had been subject to Duma “interpellations” about the legality of their actions. The Left SRs wanted to know why the government was repeatedly violating the will of the Second Congress of Soviets, which had made the government responsible to the Central Executive Committee. They insisted that the government cease ruling by decree.³⁸

Lenin regarded this as “bourgeois formalism.” He had long believed that the Communist regime had to combine both legislative and executive powers.³⁹ As was his wont when confronted with questions he could not or would not answer, he immediately went on the offensive, filling the air with countercharges. The Soviet Government could not be bound by “formalities.” Kerensky’s inactivity had proven fatal. Those who questioned his actions were “apologists of parliamentary obstructionism.” Bolshevik power rested on the “confidence of the broad masses.”⁴⁰ None of this explained why he was violating the terms under which he had assumed office a mere week before. Trotsky gave a slightly more substantive response. The Soviet parliament (meaning the Congress of Soviets and its Central Executive Committee), unlike the “bourgeois” one, had no antagonistic classes and therefore no need for the “conventional parliamentary machinery.” The implication of the argument was that where there were no class differences there could be no differences of opinion: from which it followed that differences of opinion signified ipso facto “counterrevolution.” The government and the “masses,” Trotsky went on, were linked not by formal institutions and procedures but by a “vital and direct bond.” Anticipating Mussolini, who would use analogous arguments to justify fascist practices, he said: “It may be true that our decrees are not smooth … but the right of vital creativity transcends formal perfection.”⁴¹

Lenin’s and Trotsky’s irrelevancies and inconsistencies failed to persuade the majority of the CEC; even some Bolsheviks felt uneasy. The Left SRs responded sharply. V. A. Karelin said:

I protest the abuse of the term “bourgeois.” Accountability and strict order in detail are mandatory not only for a bourgeois government. Let us not play on words and cover up our mistakes and blunders with a separate, odious word. Proletarian government, which in its is essence popular, must also allow controls over itself. After all, the workers taking over an enterprise does not lead to the abolition of bookkeeping and accounting. This hasty cooking of decrees, which not only frequently abound in juridical omissions but are often illiterate, leads to still greater confusion of the situation, especially in the provinces, where they are accustomed to accepting a law in the form in which it is given from above.⁴²

Another Left SR, P. P. Proshian, described the Bolshevik Press Decree as a “clear and determined expression of a system of political terror and incitement to civil war.”⁴³

The Bolsheviks readily won the vote on the Press Decree: a motion to abrogate the decree, introduced by Larin, went down 34–24, with one abstention.* Despite this endorsement, the Bolsheviks were unable to silence the press until August 1918, when they eliminated in one fell swoop all independent newspapers and periodicals. Until then, Soviet Russia had a surprising variety of newspapers and journals, including those of a liberal and even conservative orientation: heavily fined and harassed in other ways, they somehow managed to stay alive.

There still remained the critical issue of the Sovnarkom’s responsibility to the CEC. On this matter, the Bolshevik Government, for the first and last time, submitted itself to a vote of confidence. It came on a motion of the Left SR V. B. Spiro: “The Central Executive Committee, having heard the explanations offered by the chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, finds them unsatisfactory.” The Bolshevik M. S. Uritskii responded with a counter-motion expressing confidence in Lenin’s government:

In regard to the interpellation, the Central Executive Committee determines: 1. The Soviet parliament of the working masses can have nothing in common in its procedures with the bourgeois parliament, in which are represented various classes with antagonistic interests and where the representatives of the ruling class transform rules and instructions into weapons of legislative obstruction;

2. The Soviet parliament cannot refuse the Council of People’s Commissars the right to issue, without prior discussion by the Central Executive Committee, urgent decrees within the framework of the general program of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets;

3. The Central Executive Committee exercises general control over the activity of the Council of People’s Commissars and is free to change the government or its individual members …⁴⁴

Spiro’s no-confidence motion was defeated 25 to 20: the low vote resulted from the withdrawal of the nine Bolsheviks, some of them commissars, who had announced their resignation at this meeting (see above, this page). The negative victory was not enough for Lenin: he wanted it affirmed, formally and unequivocally, by a vote on Uritskii’s motion, that his government had the power to legislate. But the prospect looked in doubt because Bolshevik ranks had suddenly shrunk: a preliminary count showed that a vote on Uritskii’s motion would produce a tie (23–23). To prevent this, Lenin and Trotsky announced that they would take part in the voting—an action equivalent to ministers joining the legislature in voting on a law which they had submitted for its approval. If Russia’s “parliamentarians” had had more experience, they would have refused to participate in the travesty. But they stayed and they voted. Uritskii’s motion carried 25–23, the decisive two votes being cast by Lenin and Trotsky. By this simple procedure, the two Bolshevik leaders arrogated to themselves legislative authority and transformed the CEC and the Congress of Soviets, which it represented, from legislative into consultative bodies. It was a watershed in the history of the Soviet constitution.

Later that day, the Sovnarkom announced that its decrees acquired force of law when they appeared in the pages of the official Gazette of the Provisional Workers’ and Peasants’ Government (Gazeta Vremennogo Rabochego i Krest’ianskogo Pravitel’stva).

The Sovnarkom now became in theory what it had been in fact since its inception, an organ combining executive and legislative authority. The CEC was allowed for a while longer to enjoy the right to debate the actions of the government, a right which, even if it had no eifect on policy, at least provided opportunities for criticism. But after June–July 1918, when non-Bolsheviks were ejected from it, the CEC turned into an echo chamber in which Bolshevik deputies routinely “ratified” the decisions of the Bolshevik Sovnarkom, which, in turn, implemented decisions of the Bolshevik Central Committee.*

This sudden and complete collapse of democratic forces and their subsequent inability to reclaim constitutional powers recalls the failure of the Supreme Privy Council in 1730 to impose constitutional restraints on the Russian monarchy: then, as now, a firm “no” from the autocrat proved sufficient.

From this day on, Russia was ruled by decree. Lenin assumed the prerogatives that the tsars had enjoyed before October 1905: his will was law. In the words of Trotsky: “From the moment the Provisional Government was declared deposed, Lenin acted in matters large and small as the government.”† The “decrees” which the Sovnarkom issued, although bearing a name borrowed from revolutionary France and previously unknown to Russian constitutional law, corresponded fully to imperial ukazy in that like them they dealt indiscriminately with the most fundamental as well as most trivial matters, and went into effect the instant the autocrat affixed his signature to them. (According to Isaac Steinberg, “Lenin was ordinarily of the opinion that his signature had to suffice for any governmental act.”)⁴⁵ Bonch-Bruevich, Lenin’s executive secretary, writes that decrees acquired force of law only after being signed by Lenin, even if issued on the initiative of one of the commissars.^46‡ These practices would have been entirely understandable to a Nicholas I or Alexander III. The system of government which the Bolsheviks set in place within two weeks of the October coup marked a reversion to the autocratic regime that had ruled Russia before 1905: they simply wiped out the twelve intervening years of constitutionalism.

The intelligentsia was the one group that did not participate in the nationwide duvan and would not allow itself to be diverted by “clinking bags.” It had welcomed the February Revolution with boundless enthusiasm; it rejected the October coup. Even some Communist historians have come to concede that students, professors, writers, artists, and others who had led the opposition to tsarism, overwhelmingly opposed the Bolshevik takeover: one of them states that the intelligentsia “almost to a man” engaged in “sabotage.”⁴⁷ It took the Bolsheviks months of coercion and cajolery to break this resistance. The intelligentsia began to cooperate with the Bolsheviks only after it had concluded that the regime was here to stay and boycotting it would only make matters worse.

The most dramatic manifestation of the refusal by Russia’s educated class to accept the October coup was the general strike of white-collar personnel (sluzhashchie). Although the Bolsheviks then and since have dismissed this action as “sabotage,” it was, in fact, a grandiose, non-violent act of protest by the nation’s civil servants and employees of private enterprises against the destruction of democracy.⁴⁸ The strike, intended to demonstrate to the Bolsheviks their unpopularity and, at the same time, make it impossible for them to govern, broke out spontaneously. It quickly acquired an organizational structure, first in the shape of strike committees in the ministries, banks, and other public institutions and then in a coordinating body called the Committee for the Salvation of the Fatherland and the Revolution (Komitet Spaseniia Rodiny i Revoliutsii). The committee originally consisted of Municipal Duma officials, members of the Central Executive Committee of Soviets dissolved by the Bolsheviks, representatives of the All-Russian Congress of Peasant Soviets, the Union of Unions of Government Employees, and several clerical unions, including that of postal workers. Gradually, representatives of Russian socialist parties, the Left SRs excepted, also joined. The committee appealed to the nation not to cooperate with the usurpers and to fight for the restoration of democracy.⁴⁹ On October 28 it called on the Bolsheviks to relinquish power.⁵⁰

On October 29, the Union of Unions of Government Employees in Petrograd, in cooperation with the committee (which apparently financed the strike), asked its membership to stop work:

The committee of the Union of Unions of Government Employees at Petrograd, having discussed with the delegates of the central committees of the All-Russian Union of Government Employees the question of the usurpation of power by the Bolshevik group in the Petrograd Soviet a month before the convocation of the Constituent Assembly, and considering that this criminal act threatens the destruction of Russia and all the conquests of the Revolution, in accord with the Ail-Russian Committee for the Salvation of the Fatherland and the Revolution … resolved that:

1. Work in all the administrative departments of the government shall cease immediately;

2. The questions of food supply for the army and the population, as well as the activity of the institutions concerned with the maintenance of public order, are to be decided by the Committee for the Salvation [of the Fatherland and the Revolution] in cooperation with the committees of the Union of Unions;

3. The action of the administrative departments which have already ceased their work is approved.⁵¹

The appeal was widely heeded: soon work in all the ministries in Petrograd ground to a halt. Except for porters and some secretarial staff, their personnel either failed to come to work or came and sat doing nothing. The freshly appointed Bolshevik commissars, having no place to go, hung around Lenin’s headquarters in Smolnyi, issuing orders to which no one paid attention. Access to the ministries was barred to them:

When, after the first October days, the People’s Commissars came to work in the former ministries, they found, along with mountains of papers and folders, only couriers, cleaning people, and doormen. All the officials, beginning with the directors and administrators and ending with typists and copiers, considered it their duty to refuse to recognize the commissars and to stay away from work.⁵²

Trotsky had an embarrassing experience when on November 9—two weeks after receiving his appointment—he ventured to visit the Ministry of Foreign Affairs:

Yesterday, the new “minister,” Trotsky, came to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. After calling together all the officials, he said: “I am the new Minister of Foreign Affairs, Trotsky.” He was greeted with ironic laughter. To this he paid no attention and told them to go back to their work. They went … but to their own homes, with the intention of not returning to [the] office as long as Trotsky remained head of the ministry.⁵³

Shliapnikov, the Commissar of Labor, had a similar reception when he tried to take charge of his ministry.⁵⁴ The Bolshevik Government thus found itself in the absurd situation of being unable, weeks after it had assumed authority, to persuade the country’s civil servants to work for it. It could hardly be said, therefore, to have functioned.

The strike spread to non-governmental institutions. Private banks had shut their doors as early as October 26–27. On November 1, the All-Russian Union of Postal and Telegraph Employees announced that unless the Bolshevik Government gave way to a coalition cabinet it would order its membership to stop work.⁵⁵ Soon telegraph and telephone workers walked out in Petrograd, Moscow, and some provincial towns. On November 2, Petrograd’s pharmacists went on strike; on November 7, water transport workers followed suit as did schoolteachers. On November 8, the Union of Printers in Petrograd announced that if the Bolsheviks carried out their Press Decree they, too, would strike.

For the Bolsheviks, the most painful were work stoppages at the government’s fiscal institutions, the State Bank and the State Treasury. They could manage for the time being, without the ministries of Foreign Affairs or of Labor, but they had to have money. The bank and the Treasury refused to honor the Sovnarkom’s requests for funds, on the grounds that it was not a legitimate government: couriers sent by Smolnyi with drafts signed by People’s Commissars came back empty-handed. The staffs of the bank and the treasury recognized the old Provisional Government and paid only its representatives; they also honored requests from legitimate public authorities and the military. On November 4, in response to Bolshevik charges that its actions were causing hardship to the population, the State Bank declared that during the preceding week it had paid out 610 million rubles for the needs of the population and the armed forces; 40 million of that sum went to representatives of the old Provisional Government.⁵⁶

On October 30, the Sovnarkom ordered all state and private banks to open for business the next day. Refusal to honor checks and drafts from government institutions, it warned, would lead to the arrest of the directors.⁵⁷ Under this threat, some private banks reopened, but still none would cash checks issued by the Sovnarkom.

Desperate for money, the Bolsheviks resorted to harsher measures. On November 7, V. R. Menzhinskii, the new Commissar of Finance, appeared at the State Bank with armed sailors and a military band. He demanded 10 million rubles. The bank refused. He returned four days later with more troops and presented an ultimatum: unless money was forthcoming within twenty minutes, not only would the staff of the State Bank lose their jobs and pensions but those of military age would be drafted. The bank stood firm. The Sovnarkom dismissed some of the bank’s officials, but it still had no money, more than two weeks after assuming governmental responsibilities.

On November 14, the clerical personnel of Petrograd banks met to decide what to do next. Employees of the State Bank voted overwhelmingly to deny recognition to the Sovnarkom and go on with the strike. Clerks of private banks reached the same conclusion. The staff of the State Treasury voted 142–14 to refuse the Bolsheviks access to government funds: they also rejected a Sovnarkom request for a “short-term advance” of 25 million rubles.⁵⁸

In the face of this resistance, the Bolsheviks had recourse to force. On November 17, Menzhinskii reappeared at the State Bank: he found it deserted, save for some couriers and watchmen. Officers of the bank were brought in under armed guard. When they refused to hand over money, guards compelled them to open the vaults, from which Menzhinskii removed 5 million rubles. He carried it to Smolnyi in a velvet bag, which he triumphantly deposited on Lenin’s desk.⁵⁹ The whole operation resembled a bank holdup.

The Bolsheviks now had access to Treasury funds, but strikes of bank personnel continued, despite arrests; nearly all banks remained closed. The State Bank, occupied by Bolshevik troops, was inoperative. It was to break the resistance of financial personnel that Lenin initially created, in December 1917, his security police, the Cheka.

A contemporary survey showed that in mid-December work was at a standstill at the ministries (now renamed commissariats) of Foreign Affairs, Enlightenment, Justice, and Supply, while the State Bank was in complete disarray.⁶⁰ White-collar strikes also broke out in the provincial towns: in mid-November the municipal workers of Moscow struck; their colleagues in Petrograd followed suit on December 3. These work stoppages had one common purpose: modeled on the General Strike of October 1905, they were to force the government to renounce claims to autocracy. It was this powerful demonstration that persuaded Kamenev, Zinoviev, Rykov, and some other associates of Lenin that they had to share power with other socialist parties or the government could not function.

Lenin, however, held his ground and in mid-November ordered a counter-offensive. The Bolsheviks now physically occupied, one by one, every public institution in Petrograd and compelled their employees, under threat of severe punishment, to work for them. The following incident, reported by a contemporary newspaper, was repeated in many places:

On December 28 [OS], the Bolsheviks seized the Department of Customs. Directing the occupied Customs office is an official named Fadenev. On the eve of the Christmas holidays, following a general meeting of departmental employees, Fadenev had ordered everyone to return to work on December 28: those who failed to appear, he threatened, would lose their jobs and be liable to prosecution. On December 28, the department building was occupied by inspectors. The Bolsheviks allowed into the building only those employees who would sign a statement of full subordination to the “Council of People’s Commissars.”⁶¹

The directors of the Customs Department were subsequently dismissed and replaced with lower clerical staff. This pattern was repeated as the Bolsheviks conquered, in the literal sense of the word, the apparatus of the central government, often with the support of the junior staff whom they won over with promises of rapid promotion. They broke the strike of white collar employees only in January 1918, after they had dispersed the Constituent Assembly and ended all hope that they would voluntarily surrender or even share power.

During its initial three weeks, the Sovnarkom led a paper existence since it had neither a staff to execute its orders nor money to pay its own people. The Bolshevik commissars, barred from their offices, operated from Room 67 at Smolnyi, where Lenin had his headquarters. Lenin, ever fearful of attempts on his life, ordered that no one except People’s Commissars be allowed into his office: he rarely left Smolnyi, where he lived and officiated closely guarded by Latvians.* ⁶² As the Secretary of the Sovnarkom he picked the twenty-five-year-old N. P. Gorbunov. The new secretary, who had no administrative experience, confiscated a typewriter and a table and proceeded to peck out decrees with two fingers.⁶³ V. Bonch-Bruevich, a devoted Bolshevik and a student of religious dissenters, was appointed Lenin’s private assistant. The two men hired clerical personnel. By the end of the year, the Sovnarkom had forty-eight clerical employees; in the next two months it acquired seventeen more. Judging by a group photograph taken in October 1918, a high proportion of these were clean-cut bourgeois young ladies.

73. Latvians guarding Lenin’s office in Smolnyi: 1917.

Prior to November 15, 1917, the Sovnarkom held no regular sessions: according to Gorbunov one meeting took place on November 3, but its only order of business was to hear a report by Nogin on the fighting in Moscow. During this period such decrees and ordnances as came out were the work of Bolshevik functionaries, who acted independently, often without consulting Lenin. According to Larin, only two of the first fifteen decrees issued by the Soviet Government were discussed in the Sovnarkom: the Decree on the Press, drafted by Lunarcharskii, and the Decree on Elections to the Constituent Assembly, prepared by himself. Gorbunov says Lenin authorized him to cable directives to the provinces on his own, showing him only every tenth telegram.⁶⁴

The first regular meeting of the Sovnarkom took place on November 15, with an agenda of twenty items. It was agreed that the commissars would move out of Smolnyi as expeditiously as possible and take over their respective commissariats, which they did in the weeks that followed, with the help of armed detachments. From that day onward, the Sovnarkom met almost daily on the third floor of Smolnyi, usually in the evening: the meetings sometimes ran all night. Attendance was not much restricted, with many lower-level officials and non-Bolshevik technical experts brought in as the need arose. The commissars, lifelong revolutionaries, felt awkward. Simon Liberman, a Menshevik timber expert who occasionally attended Sovnarkom sessions, recalls the meetings as follows:

74. Lenin and secretarial staff of the Council of People’s Commissars: October 1918.

A peculiar atmosphere prevailed at the conferences of the highest administrative councils of Soviet Russia, presided over by Lenin. Despite all the efforts of an officious secretary to impart to each session the solemn character of a cabinet meeting, we could not help feeling that here we were, attending another sitting of an underground revolutionary committee! For years we had belonged to various underground organizations. All of this seemed so familiar. Many of the commissars remained seated in their topcoats or greatcoats; most of them wore the forbidding leather jackets. In wintertime some wore felt boots and thick sweaters. They remained thus clothed throughout the meetings.

One of the commissars, Alexander Tsuriupa, was nearly always ill; he attended these sessions in a semi-reclining position, his feet stretched out on a nearby chair. A number of Lenin’s aides would not take their seats at the conference table but shoved their chairs around helter-skelter all over the room. Lenin alone invariably took his seat at the table as the presiding officer of the occasion. He did so in a neat, almost decorous way. Fotieva, as his personal secretary, sat beside him.⁶⁵

Lenin, irritated by the unpunctuality and verbosity of his colleagues, worked out strict rules. To prevent chatter, he insisted on strict adherence to the agenda.* To ensure that his commissars showed up on time, he set fines for lateness: five rubles for less than half an hour, ten for more.⁶⁶

75. One of the early meetings of the Council of People’s Commissars. Lenin in the center. Behind him, hand at mouth, Stalin.

According to Liberman, the meetings of the Sovnarkom which he attended never decided on policy but dealt only with implementation:

I never heard arguments over matters of principle; the discussion always revolved around the problem of finding the best possible methods of carrying out a given measure. Matters of principle were decided elsewhere—in the Political Bureau of the Communist Party.… The two highest organs of the Government which I knew—the Council of People’s Commissars and the Council of Labor and Defense—discussed practical ways to effect measures already decided upon by the inner sanctum of the party—its Political Bureau.†

To relieve the Sovnarkom of the many trivial issues that threatened to overburden its agenda, a Small Sovnarkom was created on December 18, 1917.

Government decisions became law when signed by Lenin and usually co-signed by one of the commissars, and then published in the official Gazette, the first issue of which appeared on October 28. It then acquired the status of a “decree” (dekret). Orders issued by the commissars on their own initiative were usually called “resolutions” (postanovleniia). Theory, however, was not always observed in practice. On certain occasions—this happened especially with laws sure to be unpopular—Lenin preferred that decrees be issued by the CEC and signed by its chairman, Sverdlov: this procedure had the effect of shifting the blame from the Bolsheviks onto the soviets. Some important laws were never published—such as the one creating the Cheka. Other measures—for instance, the introduction of the practice of taking hostages (September 1918)—came out in the name of the Commissar of Internal Affairs: it was published in Izvestiia, but is not included in the corpus of Soviet laws and decrees. Before long, the Bolsheviks reverted to the tsarist practice of legislating by means of secret circulars, which were not published at the time and many of which remain unpublished to this day: as under the old regime, the government resorted to this practice in matters involving state security.

In the first months of Bolshevik rule, decrees were issued not so much for their practical effect as for purposes of propaganda.⁶⁷ Without means to enforce his laws, and uncertain how long his regime would survive, Lenin thought of them as models from which future generations could learn how to make revolution. Since they were not expected to be implemented, the early decrees were exhortative in tone and careless in phrasing. Lenin gave this matter serious attention only three months after coming to power: on January 30, 1918, he ordered that legislative drafts be submitted for review to the Commissariat of Justice, which had trained jurists.⁶⁸ Laws issued from the spring of 1918 onward became so convoluted it is obvious they were not only reviewed but drafted by experienced bureaucrats of the old regime, who now entered Soviet service in large numbers.

It will be recalled (this page, above) that to appease critics on the Central Committee, Lenin and Trotsky agreed to continue negotiating with the Left SRs on their entry into the government, and to make one more effort to come to terms with the Mensheviks and SRs. The latter objective they never seriously pursued; Lenin had no desire to admit his socialist rivals into partnership. But he did want to bring in the Left SRs. He knew them for what they were: a loosely knit band of revolutionary hotheads, drunk on words, incapable of concerted action because of their faith in mass “spontaneity.” They were no threat, but they had their uses. Their presence in the cabinet would disarm the charge that the Bolsheviks monopolized the government: it would prove that any party prepared to “accept October”—the Bolshevik coup—was welcome. Still more valuable was the ability of the Left SRs to provide the Bolsheviks entry to the peasantry, with whose organizations they had no contact. Since it was absurd to pretend to the status of a government of “workers and peasants” without any peasant representatives, the Left SR access to the peasantry was a considerable asset. Lenin had great hopes (unrealistic, as events were to show) that the Left SRs would split the peasant vote for the Constituent Assembly and possibly give the Bolsheviks and their allies a majority.

The two parties negotiated in secret. On November 18, Izvestiia announced—prematurely, it turned out—that agreement had been reached with the Left SRs on their entry into the Sovnarkom. But the talks went on for three more weeks, in the course of which the two parties established a close working relationship. The Left SRs now joined forces with the Bolsheviks and helped them destroy the independent peasant movement dominated by the Socialists-Revolutionaries.

The Congress of Peasants’ Deputies, which represented four-fifths of Russia’s population, rejected the October coup. It sent no delegates to the Second Congress of Soviets, joining instead the Committee for the Salvation of the Fatherland and the Revolution. This opposition was awkward for the Bolsheviks; they had to win over the Peasants’ Congress or, failing that, replace it with another body, friendly to them. Their strategy, which they subsequently repeated in regard to the Constituent Assembly and other democratic but anti-Bolshevik representative bodies, involved three steps. First, they sought to gain control of a given body’s Mandate Commission, which determined who could attend: this enabled them to bring in more Bolshevik and pro-Bolshevik deputies than they would have obtained in free elections. If such a body, packed with their followers, nevertheless failed to pass Bolshevik resolutions, they disrupted it with noise and threats of violence. If that method also failed, then they declared the meeting unlawful, walked out, and set up a rival meeting of their own.

As the elections to the Constituent Assembly, held in the second half of November, would demonstrate, the Bolsheviks enjoyed no support in the rural areas. This bode ill for their prospects at the Congress of Peasants’ Deputies, scheduled for the end of November, where the SRs were certain to pass resolutions denouncing the Bolshevik dictatorship. To prevent this, the Bolsheviks, helped by the Left SRs, tried to manipulate the Mandate Commission demanding that the delegates to the congress, ordinarily elected by provincial and district soviets, be augmented with representatives from military units. This demand had no justification, since the military already were represented in the Soldiers’ Section of the Soviet. But the SRs on the Mandate Commission, eager to placate the Bolsheviks, agreed: as a result, instead of completely dominating the Peasants’ Congress, they had to make do with a bare majority. The final tally of deputies to the Peasants’ Congress showed 789 delegates, of whom 489 were bona fide peasant representatives, chosen by the rural soviets, and 294 were men in uniform handpicked by the Bolsheviks and Left SRs from the garrisons of Petrograd and vicinity. The party affiliation showed 307 SRs and 91 Bolsheviks; the affiliation of the remaining 391 was not stated, but judging by subsequent voting results, a high proportion of them were Left SRs.*

In yet another conciliatory gesture, the SR leadership agreed to giving the chairmanship of the congress to Maria Spiridonova, the leader of the Left SRs. Although the peasants indeed idolized her for her terrorist exploits before the Revolution, it was an ill-considered concession because the impulsive Spiridonova was completely manipulated by the Bolsheviks.

The Second Congress of Peasants’ Deputies opened in Petrograd on November 26 in the Alexander Hall of the Municipal Duma. From the outset, Bolshevik deputies, cheered on by the Left SRs, engaged in disruptive tactics, hooting, screaming, and shouting down speakers from rival parties; for a while they physically occupied the rostrum. The disturbance forced Spiridonova on several occasions to declare a recess.

The critical session took place on December 2. On that day, several SR speakers protested the arrest and harassment of delegates to the Constituent Assembly, some of whom were also elected to the Peasants’ Congress. During one of these speeches, Lenin appeared. An SR, pointing at him, shouted to the Bolsheviks: “You will bring Russia to the point where Nicholas will be replaced by Lenin. We need no autocratic authority. We need the rule of soviets!” Lenin asked to speak in his capacity as head of state, but he was told that since no one had elected him, he could only have the floor as head of the Bolshevik Party. His address denigrated the Constituent Assembly and dismissed complaints of Bolshevik harassment of its deputies. Lenin promised, however, that the Assembly would meet when a quorum of 400 deputies had gathered in Petrograd.

When he left, Chernov moved a resolution which rejected the Bolshevik claim that to acknowledge the authority of the Constituent Assembly was tantamount to rejecting the soviets:

The congress believes that the soviets of workers’, soldiers’, and peasants’ deputies, as the ideological and political guides of the masses, should be the strong combat points of the Revolution standing guard over the conquests of peasants and workers. With its legislative creativity, the Constituent Assembly must translate into life the aspirations of the masses, as expressed by the soviets. In consequence, the congress protests against the attempts of individual groups to pit the soviets and the Constituent Assembly against each other.†

The Bolsheviks and Left SRs introduced a counterresolution which called on the congress to approve the Bolshevik measures against the Kadets and some other deputies to the Constituent Assembly on the grounds that the Assembly did not enjoy parliamentary immunity.⁶⁹

Chernov’s resolution carried, 360–321. The Bolsheviks persuaded Spiridonova to set this vote aside: on the following day she declared that it had not been a binding vote, but only the “basis” for one. Before this matter could be cleared up, Trotsky made an appearance and asked for the floor to report on the progress of the peace negotiations at Brest-Litovsk. The diversionary move was greeted with hoots, whereupon Trotsky departed, followed by the Bolshevik and Left SR delegates.

The following day, December 4, the Bolsheviks and the Left SRs returned to the Alexander Hall and renewed disruptive tactics. In the resulting bedlam no speaker could be heard, whereupon the SRs and their adherents, singing the “Marseillaise,” walked out. They resumed deliberations at the Agricultural Museum on the Fontanka, the seat of the Central Executive Committee of the Congress of Peasants’ Deputies. From this moment, the “right” and “left” wings of the congress met separately: attempts to reunite them failed due to the Bolshevik refusal to acknowledge the validity of the December 2 vote on the Constituent Assembly. On December 6, the Bolsheviks and Left SRs declared their sessions at the Municipal Duma to be the only legitimate spokesman for the peasant soviets, although in fact there were no representatives of peasant soviets present. They denied all authority to the Central Executive Committee of the Peasants’ Congress, divested it of its technical apparatus and personnel, and stopped the per diems which the peasants’ deputies were paid by the government. Finally, on December 8, the Bolshevik and Left SR rump Congress of Peasants’ Deputies fused with the Bolshevik-controlled AU-Russian Central Executive Committee.

Thus, the Bolsheviks took over the Peasants’ Congress, first by introducing into it deputies whom they, not the peasants, had chosen, and then by declaring these deputies to be the sole legitimate representatives of the peasantry. They could not have accomplished this without the collaboration of the Left SRs. As a reward for this service, and in anticipation of further services, the Bolsheviks made major concessions to the Left SRs to bring them into the government as junior partners.

The two parties reached agreement on the night of December 9–10, immediately after liquidating jointly the Peasants’ Congress.⁷⁰ Its terms have never been published and have to be reconstructed from subsequent events. The Left SRs posed several conditions: lifting the Press Decree, inclusion of other socialist parties in the government, abolition of the Cheka, prompt convocation of the Constituent Assembly. On the first demand, the Bolsheviks yielded in effect by allowing all sorts of hostile newspapers to appear, without formally repealing the Press Decree. On the second issue, Lenin proved conciliatory: he merely asked that the other socialist parties follow the example of the Left SRs and acknowledge the October Revolution. Since no party was inclined to do that, this particular concession cost him nothing. On the Cheka, the Bolsheviks stood firm: they would neither do away with it nor formally circum-scribe its authority—the counterrevolution did not permit such luxury—but the Left SRs could have representatives in the Cheka Collegium to satisfy themselves there was no unnecessary terror. On the Constituent Assembly, the Bolsheviks reluctantly granted the Left SR demand. It is virtually certain that it is Left SR insistence that made the Bolsheviks give up the idea of annulling the elections and to allow it to meet, if only briefly. Trotsky recalls Lenin saying: “Of course, we must disperse the Constituent Assembly, but what is to be done about the Left SRs?”⁷¹

On the basis of these compromises, the Left SRs joined the Sovnarkom, where they were given five portfolios: Agriculture, Justice, Post and Telegraphs, Interior, and Local Self-Government. They were also admitted in subordinate capacities into other state institutions, including the Cheka, where the Left SR Petr Aleksandrovich Dmitrievskii (Aleksandrovich) took over as Dzerzhinskii’s deputy. The Left SRs found this arrangement satisfactory: they liked the Bolsheviks and approved of their objectives, even if they thought them a bit hotheaded. The Left SR V. A. Karelin defined his party as “a regulator moderating the excessive zeal of the Bolsheviks.”⁷²

The disruption of the Second Peasants’ Congress by the joint action of Bolsheviks and Left SRs spelled the demise of independent peasant organizations in Russia. In the middle of January 1918, the Bolshevik–Left SR Executive Committee of the self-styled Peasants’ Congress convened a Third Congress of Peasants’ Deputies, fully under their control. It was scheduled to meet concurrently with the Third Congress of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies: on this occasion, the two institutions, heretofore separate, “merged” and the Congress of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies added “Peasants’ Deputies” to its designation. This event, according to one Bolshevik historian, “completed the process of creating a single supreme organ of Soviet authority” and “put an end to the Right SR policy of running the Peasants’ Congress apart from the Congress of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies.”⁷³ It would be more accurate, however, to say that this shotgun marriage put an end to the peasantry’s self-government and completed the process of its disenfranchisement.

To free themselves completely from democratic control, they had one more hurdle to overcome: the Constituent Assembly, which, according to one contemporary, “stuck like a bone” in their throat.⁷⁴

By early December, the Bolsheviks had succeeded in (1) shunting aside the legitimate All-Russian Congress of Soviets and unseating its Executive Committee, (2) depriving the executive organ of the soviets of control over legislation and senior appointments, and (3) splitting the legitimate Peasants’ Congress and replacing it with a handpicked body of soldiers and sailors. They could get away with such subversive acts because they involved manipulation of institutions in faraway Petrograd which the country at large could not easily either follow or understand. But the Constituent Assembly was another matter. This body, chosen by the entire nation, was to be the first truly representative gathering in Russian history. To prevent it from meeting or dispersing it would constitute the most audacious coup d’état of all, a direct challenge to the nation’s will, the disenfranchisement of tens of millions. And yet, until and unless this was done, the Bolsheviks could not feel secure because their legitimacy, grounded in the resolutions of the Second Congress of Soviets, was conditional on the approval of the Assembly—approval which it was certain to deny them.

To make matters still worse, the Bolsheviks had on many occasions committed themselves to the convocation of the Assembly. Historically, the Constituent Assembly was identified with the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, which made it the centerpiece of its political program, confident that given its hold on the peasants it would enjoy in it an overwhelming majority: this the SRs intended to use to transform Russian into a republic of “toilers.” Had they been politically more astute, the SRs would have pressed the Provisional Government to hold elections as soon as possible. But they procrastinated like everyone else, which handed the Bolsheviks the opportunity to pose as the Assembly’s champions. From the late summer of 1917, the Bolsheviks accused the Provisional Government of deliberately delaying the elections in the hope that time would cool the people’s revolutionary ardor. In launching the slogan “All Power to the Soviets,” they argued that only the soviets could guarantee the Constituent Assembly. In September and October 1917 Bolshevik propaganda shouted loud and clear that the transfer of power to the soviets alone would save the Constituent Assembly.⁷⁵ As they prepared to seize power, they sometimes sounded as if their main objective was to defend the Assembly from the designs of the “bourgeoisie” and other “counterrevolutionaries.” As late as October 27, Pravda told its readers that

the new revolutionary authority will permit no hesitations: under conditions of social hegemony of the interests of the broad popular masses, it alone is capable of leading the country to a Constituent Assembly.⁷⁶

There could be no question, therefore, that Lenin and his party were committed to holding elections, convening it and submitting to the Assembly’s will. But since this Assembly was almost certain to sweep them from power, they had a problem on their hands. In the end, they gambled and won: and only after this triumph, on the ruins of the Constituent Assembly, could they feel confident of never again being challenged by democratic forces.

In assaulting the Constituent Assembly, they could find justification in Social-Democratic theory. The Social-Democratic program adopted in 1903 did call for the convocation of a Legislative Assembly, elected by the people on the basis of universal, equal, and direct voting; but neither the Bolsheviks nor the Mensheviks made a fetish of free elections. Long before the Revolution they were prepared to argue that the ballot box was not necessarily the best indicator of the people’s “true” interests. The founder of Russian Social-Democracy, Plekhanov, delivered at the Second Party Congress in 1903 some remarks on the subject, with which the Bolsheviks were later to taunt their opponents:

76. Voting for the Constituent Assembly: November 1917.

Every given democratic principle must be viewed not abstractly, on its own merits, but in its relationship to that principle which may be called the basic principle of democracy: salus populi suprema lex. Translated into the language of a revolutionary, this means that the success of the revolution is the supreme law. And if, for the sake of the revolution, it should become necessary temporarily to restrict the action of one or another democratic principle, then it would be criminal not to do so. As a personal opinion I shall state that one must view even the principle of the universal vote from the point of view of the above-mentioned fundamental principle of democracy. Hypothetically, one can conceive of a situation where we Social Democrats would oppose the universal vote.… If in an outburst of revolutionary enthusiasm the people would elect a very good parliament … then we should try to transform it into a Long Parliament; and if the elections turned out unfavorably, then we should try to disperse it—not in two years, but, if possible, in two weeks.*

Lenin shared these sentiments and in 1918 would quote them with evident relish.⁷⁷

The Provisional Government had scheduled the elections for November 12, 1917, which happened to be two weeks after it fell from power. The Bolsheviks hesitated at first whether to adhere to this date, but in the end decided to do so, and issued a decree to this effect.⁷⁸ But what to do next? While discussing the question among themselves, they interfered with the ability of their opponents to campaign. This was perhaps the principal intention behind the Press Decree and an ordinance issued by the Military-Revolutionary Committee on November 1 placing Petrograd under a state of siege: one of its provision forbade outdoor assemblies.⁷⁹

77. Electoral poster of the Constitutional-Democrats: “Vote for the Party of National Freedom.”

In Petrograd, the voting for the Assembly began on November 12, and went on for three days. Moscow voted on November 19–21; the rest of the country, in the second half of November. Eligible, according to criteria set by the Provisional Government, were male as well as female citizens twenty years and over. Voting took place over the entire territory of what had been the Russian Empire except for areas under enemy occupation—that is, Poland and the provinces on Russia’s western and northwestern frontiers. In Central Asia the results were not tabulated; the same lapse occurred in a few remote regions. Voters turned out in impressive numbers: in Petrograd and Moscow some 70 percent of those eligible went to the polls, and in some rural areas the turnout reached 100 percent, the peasants often voting as one body for a single ticket, usually the Socialist-Revolutionary. According to the most reliable count, 44.4 million cast ballots. Here and there, observers noted minor irregularities: the garrison troops, who favored the Bolsheviks for their promises of a quick peace, sometimes intimidated candidates of the other parties. But by and large, especially if one considers the difficult conditions under which they were held, the elections justified expectations. Lenin, who had no interest in praising them, stated on December 1: “If one views the Constituent Assembly apart from the conditions of the class struggle, which verges on civil war, then as of now we know of no institution more perfect as a means of expressing the people’s will.”⁸⁰

Voting was very complicated, given that many splinter parties put up candidates, sometimes in blocs with other parties: the configuration differed from region to region, becoming especially complex in such borderland areas as the Ukraine, where, alongside Russian parties, there were parties representing the local minorities.

Of the socialists, the Bolsheviks alone campaigned without a formal platform. They apparently counted on winning votes with broad appeals to workers, soldiers, and peasants, centered on the slogans “All Power to the Soviets,” and on promises of immediate peace and the confiscation of landlord properties. In electoral appeals they sought to broaden the class basis of their constituency, borrowing the SRs’ un-Marxist term “the toiling masses.” In evaluating the results of the elections, therefore, it must be borne in mind that many and perhaps even most of those who cast ballots for the Bolsheviks were expressing approval, not of the Bolshevik platform, of which they knew nothing because it did not even exist, let alone of the hidden Bolshevik agenda of a one-party dictatorship, never mentioned in Bolshevik pronouncements, but of the rule of soviets, an end to the war, and the abolition of private landholding in favor of communal redistribution, none of which figured among ultimate Bolshevik objectives.

Lenin, hoping against hope, for a while deluded himself that the Left SRs would tear the SR Party apart to such an extent as to give the Bolsheviks a victory.⁸¹ The strong showing which the Left SRs made at the Petrograd City Conference in November gave some substance to this hope.⁸² But in the end it proved unfounded: although the Bolsheviks made a strong showing, especially in the cities and among the military, they came in second place, trailing far behind the Socialists-Revolutionaries. This outcome sealed the fate of the Assembly.

The results of the elections cannot be precisely determined because in many localities the parties and their offshoots ran in coalitions, sometimes of a very complicated nature: in Petrograd alone, nineteen parties competed. The problem is exacerbated by the practice of the Communist authorities, who control the raw data, of lumping together under the categories “bourgeois” and “petty bourgeois” parties and groupings that ran on separate tickets. As best can be determined, the final results were (in thousands) as follows (see table on this page).⁸³

The results, although not entirely unexpected, disappointed Lenin. The peasants, whom he had hoped to attract by adopting the SR land program, not only did not vote Bolshevik: they did not even vote for the Left SRs. One of the arguments the Bolsheviks later used to challenge the validity of the elections was that the split in the SR party had occurred too late for the Left SRs to run on separate ballots. But there exist figures which demonstrate that this argument had no substance. In several electoral districts (Voronezh, Viatka, and Tobolsk) the Left SRs and the mainstream SRs did run on separate tickets. In none of them did the Left SRs win significant support: the tally showed 1,839,000 votes cast for the SR Party and a mere 26,000 for the Left

RUSSIAN SOCIALIST PARTIES: 68.9% Socialists-Revolutionaries 17,943 (40.4%) Bolsheviks 10,661 (24.0%) Mensheviks 1,144 (2.6%) Left SRs 451 (1.0%) Others 401 (0.9%) RUSSIAN LIBERAL AND OTHER non-socialist parties: 7.5% Constitutional-Democrats 2,088 (4.7%) Others 1,261 (2.8%) NATIONAL MINORITY PARTIES: 13.4% Ukrainian SRs 3,433 (7.7%) Georgian Mensheviks 662 (1.5%) Mussavat (Azerbaijan) 616 (1.4%) Dashnaktsutiun (Armenia) 560 (1-3%) Alash Orda (Kazakhstan) 262 (0.6%) Others 407 (0.9%) UNACCOUNTED 4,543 (10.2%)

SRs.⁸⁴ The Bolsheviks gained 175 out of 715 seats in the Assembly; together with the SR deputies who identified themselves as Left, they had 30 percent of the delegates.*

The Bolsheviks were also unhappy over the strong showing of the Kadets, the opposition party they feared the most. Although the Kadets had gained less than 5 percent of the national vote, the Bolsheviks viewed them as the most formidable rival: they had the largest number of active supporters and the most newspapers; they were far better organized and financed than the SRs; and unlike the Bolsheviks’ socialist rivals, they did not feel constrained by a sense of comradeship, dedication to a common social ideal, and fear of the “counterrevolution.” As the only major non-socialist party still functioning in late 1917, the Kadets were likely to attract the entire right-of-center electorate, monarchists included. If one looks at the overall election results one may indeed conclude that the Kadets “had experienced not so much a walloping as a washout.”⁸⁵ But this would be a superficial conclusion. The nationwide figures concealed the important political fact that the Kadets did very well in the urban centers which the Bolsheviks needed to control to offset their weakness in the countryside and viewed as the decisive battleground in the coming civil war. In Petrograd and Moscow, the Kadets ran a strong second to the Bolsheviks, winning 26.2 percent of the vote in the former and 34.2 percent in the latter. If one subtracted from the Bolshevik total in Moscow the vote of the military garrison, which was in the process of evanescing, the Kadets had 36.4 percent of the vote as against the Bolshevik 45.3 percent.⁸⁶ Furthermore, the Kadets bested the Bolsheviks in eleven out of thirty-eight provincial capitals and in many others ran a close second. They thus represented a much more formidable political force than one could conclude from the undifferentiated election returns.

These disappointments notwithstanding, the outcome held some consolation for the Bolsheviks. Lenin, who analyzed the figures with the detachment of a commander surveying the order of battle—he even referred to the various electoral blocs as “armies”⁸⁷—could take comfort in the fact that his party did best in the center of the country: the large cities, the industrial areas, and the military garrisons.⁸⁸ The victorious SRs drew their strength from the black-earth zone and Siberia. As he was later to observe, this geographic distribution of votes foreshadowed the front lines in the civil war between the Red and White armies,⁸⁹ in which the Bolsheviks would control the heartland of Russia and their opponents the rimlands.

Another source of satisfaction for the Bolsheviks was the support of soldiers and sailors, especially units billeted in the cities. These troops had only one desire: to get home, the quicker the better, to share in the repartition of land. Since the Bolsheviks alone of all the parties promised to open immediate peace negotiations, they showed for them a strong preference. The Petrograd and Moscow garrisons cast, respectively, 71.3 and 74.3 percent of the vote for the Bolsheviks. The front-line troops in the northwest, near Petrograd, also gave them majorities. The Bolsheviks did not do as well at the more distant fronts, where their anti-war propaganda had less resonance, but even so, in the four field armies for which records are available, they won 56 percent of the vote.⁹⁰ Lenin had no illusions about the solidity of this support, which was bound to evaporate as the troops headed home. But for the time being the backing of the military was decisive: the pro-Bolshevik troops formed a power that even in small numbers could intimidate the democratic opposition. Analyzing the election results, Lenin noted with satisfaction that in the military the Bolsheviks possessed “a political striking force which assured them of an overwhelming preponderance of forces at the decisive point in the decisive moment.”⁹¹

The Sovnarkom discussed the Constituent Assembly on November 20. Several important decisions were taken.⁹² The opening of the Assembly was postponed indefinitely. The ostensible reason was the difficulty of gathering a quorum by November 28;⁹³ the true reason was to allow the Bolsheviks more time. Instructions went out to provincial soviets to report on all electoral “abuses”; they were to serve as a pretext for “reelections.”⁹⁴ P. E. Dybenko, the Commissar of the Navy, received orders to assemble in Petrograd between 10,000 and 12,000 armed sailors.⁹⁵ And perhaps most significantly, it was decided to convene the Third Congress of Soviets on January 8: packed solidly with their supporters and Left SRs, it was to be a surrogate for the Assembly. These measures indicated Bolshevik intentions to abort the Constituent Assembly in one manner or another.

The government’s announcement indefinitely postponing the opening of the Assembly evoked strong protests from the socialist parties and deputies to the Peasants’ Congress. On November 22–23, a Union for the Defense of the Constituent Assembly came into being, composed of representatives of the Petrograd Soviet, trade unions, and all the socialist parties except the Bolsheviks and Left SRs.⁹⁶

The Bolsheviks began their assault on the Assembly by harassing its Electoral Commission (Vsevybor). Under orders of the Sovnarkom, Stalin and Grigorii Petrovskii on November 23 ordered the commission to turn over its files: when it refused, the Cheka took its staff into custody. M. S. Uritskii, who later was to head the Petrograd Cheka, was appointed head of the Electoral Commission for the Assembly, which gave him wide discretion to determine who could attend.⁹⁷

In response, the Union for the Defense of the Constituent Assembly decided to open the Assembly on schedule in disregard of Bolshevik orders.⁹⁸ On November 28, members of the Electoral Commission, just released from prison, began to deliberate in Taurida Palace. Uritskii appeared to inform them they could meet only in his presence, but he was ignored. Supporters of the Assembly gathered demonstratively in front of Taurida: students, workers, soldiers, and striking civil servants, carrying banners “All Power to the Constituent Assembly.” One paper estimated the crowd at 200,000, but the figure seems considerably inflated: Communist sources speak of 10,000.⁹⁹ On Uritskii’s orders, Latvian Riflemen, the most dependable pro-Bolshevik troops in Petrograd, surrounded Taurida but did not interfere: some told the demonstrators they had come to protect the Constituent Assembly. Inside, forty-five deputies, mostly from Petrograd and vicinity, elected a Presidium.

The next day, armed troops formed a solid ring around Taurida: the Latvian Riflemen were back, augmented by soldiers from the Lithuanian Reserve Regiment, detachments of sailors, and a machine gun company. They kept the crowds at a safe distance, allowing into the building only delegates and accredited journalists. Toward evening, sailors ordered the deputies to leave. The following day the troops barred the entrance to everybody. These events were a rehearsal for the real trial of strength on January 5/18.

Pressing their offensive, the Bolsheviks outlawed the Constitutional-Democratic Party. Already on the opening day of the elections in Petrograd, they had dispatched armed thugs to smash the editorial offices of the Kadet Rech’; it resumed publication as Nash vek two weeks later. On November 28, Lenin wrote an ordinance under the typically propagandistic title “Decree concerning the arrest of the leaders of the civil war against the Revolution.”¹⁰⁰ The Kadet leaders were declared “enemies of the people” and were ordered taken into custody. That night and the following day, Bolshevik detachments seized every prominent Kadet they could lay their hands on, among them several delegates to the Assembly (A. I. Shingarev, P. D. Dolgorukov, F. F. Kokoshkin, S. V. Panina, A. I. Rodichev, and others). All of them were subsequently released (Panina after a brief and rather comical trial) except for Shingarev and Kokoshkin, whom Bolshevik sailors murdered in the prison hospital. As “enemies of the people” the Kadets could not participate in the Constituent Assembly. They were the first political party outlawed by the Bolshevik Government. Neither the Mensheviks nor the Socialists-Revolutionaries seemed very upset by this action.

Harassment and intimidation did not solve for the Bolsheviks the nagging problem of what to do about the Assembly. Some wanted to resort to force: one week before the elections, V. Volodarskii, a member of the Central Committee, said that “the masses never suffer from parliamentary cretinism,” least of all in Russia, and hinted that the Constituent Assembly might have to be dispersed.¹⁰¹ Nikolai Bukharin thought he had a better idea. On November 29 he proposed to the Central Committee that the Kadets be ejected from the Assembly and then the Bolshevik and Left SR deputies proclaim themselves a Revolutionary Convention: a reference to the French Convention of 1792, which took the place of the Legislative Assembly. “If the others open [a rival body] we shall arrest them,” he explained. Stalin made short shrift of this proposal on grounds of impracticability.¹⁰²

Lenin had another solution: placate the Left SRs by letting the Assembly convene, then manipulate its membership so as to obtain a more compliant body. This would be done by resorting to “recall,” “a basic, essential condition of genuine democracy.”¹⁰³ By this device, voters in districts which had chosen undesirable delegates would be persuaded to have them recalled and replaced with Bolsheviks and Left SRs. But this was at best a slow procedure, and while it was being put into effect, the Assembly could pass all manner of hostile resolutions.

Lenin finally made up his mind on this matter on December 12, immediately after reaching an accord with the Left SRs: his decision was made public the next day in Pravda under the title “Theses on the Constituent Assembly.”¹⁰⁴ It was a death sentence on the Assembly. The thrust of Lenin’s argument was thai changes in party alignments, notably the split in the SR Party, the shift in class structures, and the outbreak of the “counterrevolution,” all of which had allegedly occurred since October 25–26, had rendered the elections invalid as an indicator of the popular will:

The march of events and the development of class war in the Revolution has produced a situation in which the slogan “All Power to the Constituent Assembly” … has, in effect, turned into a slogan of the Kadets, the followers of Kaledin, and their accomplices. It is becoming clear to the whole people that this slogan, in fact, means the struggle for the elimination of soviet authority and that the Constituent Assembly, if separated from soviet authority, would inevitably be condemned to political death.… Any attempt, direct or indirect, to view the question of the Constituent Assembly from a formal juridical point of view … signifies betrayal of the cause of the proletariat and a transition to the point of view of the bourgeoisie.

Nothing in this argument made sense. The elections to the Assembly had taken place, not before October 26, but in the second half of November—that is, only seventeen days earlier: in the interim nothing had happened to invalidate Lenin’s verdict of December 1 that they were the “perfect” reflection of the people’s will. The principal champions of the Assembly were not the Kadets and certainly not the followers of the Cossack general Aleksei Kaledin, the latter of whom wanted to topple the Bolshevik regime by force of arms, but the Socialists-Revolutionaries. By turning out in large numbers at the polling stations, the “whole people,” on whose behalf Lenin claimed to speak, had shown, not that they regarded the Assembly as anti-Soviet, but looked to it with hope and expectation. And as for the claim that the Assembly was antithetical to the rule of the soviets, only people with very short memories could have forgotten that a mere seven weeks earlier, as they were reaching for power, the same Bolsheviks had insisted that soviet rule alone would guarantee the convocation of the Assembly. But here, as always, Lenin’s arguments were not meant to persuade: the key phrase occurred toward the end of the article, that further support for the Assembly was tantamount to treason.

Lenin went on to say that the Assembly could meet only if the deputies were subject to “recall”—that is, if it consented to its composition being arbitrarily altered by the government—and if it further acknowledged, without qualifications, “Soviet authority”—that is, the Bolshevik dictatorship:

Outside these conditions, the crisis connected with the Constituent Assembly can be solved only in a revolutionary manner by means of the most energetic, rapid, firm, and decisive measures on the part of Soviet authority.… Any attempt to tie the hands of Soviet authority in this struggle would signify complicity with the counterrevolution.

On these terms, the Bolsheviks agreed to have the Assembly meet on January 5/18, 1918, provided that at least 400 deputies turned up. At the same time they issued instructions for the convocation three days later (January 8/21) of the Third Congress of Soviets.

The Bolsheviks now launched a noisy propaganda campaign, the theme of which Zinoviev stated in a speech to the CEC on December 22: “We know very well that behind the pretext of the convocation of the Constituent Assembly, under the celebrated slogan ‘All Power to the Constituent Assembly,’ lies concealed the cherished slogan ‘Down with the Soviets.’ ”¹⁰⁵ This proposition the Bolsheviks made official by having it adopted by the CEC on January 3, 1918.¹⁰⁶

The protagonists of the Assembly rallied their forces. They had been put on notice. But in seeking to counter Bolshevik threats, they suffered under a grievous, indeed fatal handicap. In their eyes, the Bolsheviks had subverted democracy and forfeited the right to govern: but their removal had to be accomplished by the pressure of popular opinion, never by force, because the only beneficiary of an internecine conflict among the socialist parties would be the “counterrevolution.” By December, Petrograd knew that on the Don the generals were assembling troops: their purpose could be nothing else but subverting the Revolution and arresting and perhaps lynching all socialists. This was to them a far worse alternative than the Bolsheviks, who were genuine, if misguided, revolutionaries: admittedly too impetuous, too lustful for power, too brutal, but still “comrades” in the same endeavor. Nor could one ignore their mass following. The democratic left was convinced then and in the years that followed that the Bolsheviks would sooner or later come to realize they could not govern Russia alone. Once this happened and the socialists were invited to share power, Russia would resume her progress toward democracy. This political maturation would take time, but it was bound to occur. For this reason, resistance to the Bolsheviks had to be confined to peaceful propaganda and agitation. The possibility that the Bolsheviks were perhaps the real counterrevolutionaries occurred only to a few left-wing intellectuals, mainly from the older generation. Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik leaders never ceased to view the Bolsheviks as deviant comrades in arms: they confidently awaited the time when they would come around. In the meantime, whenever the Bolsheviks came under the assault of outside forces, they could be depended on to rally to their side.

The Union for the Defense of the Constituent Assembly now initiated its own propaganda campaign. It printed and distributed hundreds of thousands of newspapers and pamphlets¹⁰⁷ to explain why the Assembly was not anti-Soviet and why it alone had the right to give the country a constitution. It staged demonstrations in the capital and the provincial cities calling for “All Power to the Constituent Assembly.” It sent agitators to barracks and factories to obtain the signatures of soldiers and workers, including those who had voted for the Bolsheviks, on appeals calling for upholding the Assembly. The SRs and Mensheviks who organized these activities along with trade unions and striking civil servants evidently hoped that evidence of massive support would inhibit the Bolsheviks from using force against the Assembly.

A few socialists thought this was not enough: they came from the SR underground, and felt that only the methods used against tsarism—terror and street violence—would restore democracy. Their leader was Fedor Mikhailovich Onipko, an SR delegate from Stavropol and a member of the Military Commission of the Union for the Defense of the Constituent Assembly. Assisted by experienced conspirators, Onipko penetrated Smolnyi, planting there four operatives in the guise of officials and chauffeurs. Tracking Lenin’s movements and discovering that he slipped out of Smolnyi frequently to visit his sister, they placed in her house an agent posing as a janitor. Onipko wanted to kill Lenin and then Trotsky. The action was planned for Christmas day. But the SR Central Committee, which he asked for approval, absolutely refused to condone such action: if the SRs murdered Lenin and Trotsky, he was told they would be lynched by workers and only the enemies of the Revolution would benefit. Onipko was ordered to dissolve his terrorist group immediately.¹⁰⁸ He obeyed, but some conspirators (among them Nekrasov, Kerensky’s closest associate) not connected with the SR Party carried out a clumsy attempt on Lenin’s life on January 1. They inflicted a slight wound on the Swiss radical Fritz Platten, who was riding with Lenin.¹⁰⁹ After this incident, whenever he ventured out of Smolnyi, Lenin carried a revolver.

78. F. M. Onipko.

Onipko next sought to organize armed resistance against the anticipated Bolshevik assault on the Constituent Assembly. His plan, worked out with the Union for the Defense of the Constituent Assembly, called for a massive armed demonstration in front of Taurida on January 5 to intimidate pro-Bolshevik troops and ensure that the Assembly would not be dispersed. He managed to secure impressive backing. At the Preobrazhenskii, Semenovskii, and Izmailovskii Guard Regiments some 10,000 men volunteered to march, arms in hand, and fight if fired upon. Possibly as many as 2,000 workers, mainly from the Obukhov plant and the State Printing Office, agreed to join.

Before setting its plans in motion, the Military Commission went back to the Central Committee of the SR Party for authorization. The Central Committee again refused. It justified its negative stand with vague explanations, all, in the ultimate analysis, grounded in fear. No one had defended the Provisional Government, it argued. Bolshevism was a disease of the masses which required time to overcome. This was no time for risky “adventures.”¹¹⁰

The Central Committee reconfirmed its intention to hold on January 5 a peaceful demonstration: the troops would be welcome but they had to come without arms. The committee counted on the Bolsheviks not daring to open fire on the demonstrators out of fear of provoking another Bloody Sunday. When, however, Onipko and his aides returned to the barracks with the news and asked the soldiers to come unarmed, they met with derision:

“Are you making fun of us, comrades?” they responded in disbelief. “You are asking us to a demonstration but tell us to come without weapons. And the Bolsheviks? Are they little children? They will for sure fire at unarmed people. And we: are we supposed to open our mouths and give them our heads for targets, or will you order us to run, like rabbits?”¹¹¹

The soldiers refused to confront Bolshevik rifles and machine guns with bare hands and decided to sit out January 5 in their barracks.

The Bolsheviks, who got wind of these activities, took no chances and prepared for the decisive day as they would for battle. Lenin took personal command.

The first task was to win over or at least neutralize the military garrison. Bolshevik agitators sent to the barracks did not dare attack directly the Constituent Assembly because of its popularity; instead they argued that “counterrevolutionaries” were trying to exploit the Assembly to liquidate the soviets. With this argument they persuaded the Finnish Infantry Regiment to pass a resolution rejecting the slogan “All Power to the Constituent Assembly” and agreeing to support the Assembly only if it cooperated closely with the soviets. The Volhynian and Lithuanian regiments passed similar resolutions.¹¹² This was the extent of Bolshevik success. It appears that no military unit of any size would condemn the Constituent Assembly as “counterrevolutionary.” The Bolsheviks, therefore, had to rely on hastily organized units of Red Guards and sailors. But Lenin did not trust Russians and gave instructions for the Latvians to be brought in: “the muzhik may waver if anything happens,” he said.¹¹³ This marked still greater involvement of the Latvian Riflemen in the Revolution on the side of the Bolsheviks.

On January 4, Lenin appointed N. I. Podvoiskii, the ex-chairman of the Bolshevik Military Organization, which had carried out the October coup in Petrograd, to constitute an Extraordinary Military Staff.¹¹⁴ Podvoiskii once again placed Petrograd under martial law and forbade public assemblies. Proclamations to this effect were posted throughout the city. Uritskii announced in Pravda on January 5 that gatherings in the vicinity of Taurida Palace would be dispersed by force if necessary.

The Bolsheviks also sent agitators to the industrial establishments. Here they ran into hostility and incomprehension. In the largest factories—Putilov, Obukhov, Baltic, the Nevskii shipyard, and Lessner—workers had signed petitions of the Union for the Defense of the Constituent Assembly and could not understand why the Bolsheviks, with which many of them sympathized, had now turned against the Assembly.*

As the decisive day approached, the Bolshevik press kept up a steady drumbeat of warnings and threats. On January 3, it informed the population that on January 5 workers were expected to stay in their factories and soldiers in their barracks. The same day Uritskii announced that Petrograd was in danger of a counterrevolutionary coup organized by Kerensky and Savinkov, who had secretly returned to Petrograd for that purpose.* ¹¹⁵ Pravda carried a headline: TODAY THE HYENAS OF CAPITAL AND THEIR HIRELINGS WANT TO SEIZE POWER FROM SOVIET HANDS.

On Friday, January 5, Petrograd, and especially the area adjoining Taurida Palace, resembled an armed encampment. The SR Mark Vishniak, who walked to Taurida in a procession of deputies, describes the sight that greeted his eyes:

We began to move at noon, a spread-out column of some two hundred people, walking in the middle of the street. The deputies were accompanied by a few journalists, friends, and wives, who had obtained entry tickets to Taurida Palace. The distance to the palace did not exceed one kilometer: the closer one approached, the fewer pedestrians were to be seen and the more soldiers, Red Army men and sailors. They were armed to the teeth: guns slung over the shoulder, bombs, grenades, and bullets, in front and on the side, everywhere, wherever they could be attached or inserted. Individual passersby on the sidewalk, upon encountering the unusual procession, rarely greeted it with shouts: more often they followed it sympathetically with their eyes and then hurried on. The armed men approached, wanting to know who goes and where, and then returned to their stations and bivouacs.…

The entire square in front of Taurida Palace was filled with artillery, machine guns, field kitchens. Machine gun cartridge belts were piled up pell-mell. All the gates to the palace were shut, except for a wicket gate on the extreme left, through which people with passes were let in. The armed guards attentively studied one’s face before permitting entry: they inspected one’s rear, felt the backside.… After going through the left door more controls.… The guards directed the delegates across the vestibule and Catherine’s Hall into the Assembly Hall. Everywhere there were armed men, mostly sailors and Latvians. They were armed, as those on the street, with guns, grenades, munition bags, and revolvers. The number of armed men and weapons, the sound of clanking, created the impression of an encampment getting ready either to defend itself or to attack.¹¹⁶

The Bolshevik delegation, headed by Lenin, arrived at Taurida at 1 p.m. Lenin wanted to be on hand to make quick decisions as the situation unfolded. Sitting in what during the Duma period had been the “government loge,” he directed Bolshevik actions for the next nine hours. Bonch-Bruevich remembered him “excited and pale like a corpse.… In this extreme white paleness of his face and neck, his head appeared even larger, his eyes were distended and aflame, burning with a steady fire.”¹¹⁷ It was, indeed, a decisive moment in which the fate of the Bolshevik dictatorship hung in the balance.

The Assembly was to open at midday, but Lenin, through Uritskii, refused to allow it to begin proceedings until he knew what happened outside, on the streets of Petrograd, where, in defiance of Bolshevik orders, a massive demonstration had been gathering all morning. Although its organizers stressed in their appeals that they intended it to be “peaceful” and confrontations were to be avoided,¹¹⁸ Lenin had no assurance that his forces would not fold at the first sign of mass resistance. He must have had a contingency plan in mind in the event the demonstrators overwhelmed his forces: the SR Sokolov believes that if that happened, Lenin intended to come to terms with the Assembly.¹¹⁹

The Union instructed the demonstrators to gather by 10 a.m. at nine points in various parts of the city and from there proceed to the central gathering place, the Champs de Mars. At noon, they were to move in a body, under banners calling for “All Power to the Constituent Assembly,” along Panteleimon Street to Liteinyi Prospect, immediately turn right onto Kirochnaia Street, left on Potemkin Street, and right on Shpalernaia, which runs in front of Taurida Palace. After passing the palace, they were to turn right onto Taurida Street and proceed to Nevsky, where they were to disperse.

The crowd which gathered that morning throughout Petrograd was impressive (some counted as many as 50,000 participants), but neither as large nor as enthusiastic as the organizers had hoped: the troops stayed in the barracks, fewer workers than expected turned up, with the result that the participants were mainly students, civil servants, and other intellectuals, all somewhat dispirited. Bolshevik threats and displays of force had made an impression.¹²⁰

Podvoiskii knew the route the procession was to take, since the organizers had widely advertised it, and deployed his men to bar its way. The forward detachment of his troops, with loaded guns and machine guns, deployed on the streets and rooftops at the point where Panteleimon Street run into Liteinyi. As the head of the procession approached this crossing, shouts went up—“Hurrah for the Constituent Assembly!”—whereupon the troops opened fire. Some demonstrators fell, others ran for cover. But they soon re-formed and continued on their way. Because more troops barred access to Kirochnaia Street, the demonstration proceeded along Liteinyi, running into volleys of gunfire as it was about to turn into Shpalernaia. Here it broke up in disorder. Bolshevik soldiers pursued the demonstrators and seized their banners, tearing them to shreds or tossing them on bonfires. A different procession in another part of the city, composed mostly of workers, also met with gunfire. The same fate befell several smaller demonstrations.¹²¹

Russian troops had not fired on unarmed demonstrators since the fateful day in February 1917 when they dispersed crowds defying prohibitions against public gatherings: violence then had sparked mutinies and riots that marked the onset of the Revolution. And before that was Bloody Sunday and 1905. Given these experiences, it was not unreasonable for the organizers of the demonstrations to assume that this massacre, too, would ignite nationwide protests. The victims—according to some accounts eight, according to others twenty-one¹²²—received a solemn funeral on January 9, the anniversary of Bloody Sunday, and were buried at the Preobrazhenskii Cemetery, close by the casualties of that time. Worker delegations carried wreaths, one of which was inscribed: “To the victims of the arbitrariness of Smolnyi autocrats.”¹²³ Gorky wrote an angry editorial in which he compared the violence to Bloody Sunday.*

As soon as news reached him that the demonstrators had been dispersed and the streets were under Bolshevik control—this happened around 4 p.m.—Lenin ordered the meeting to begin. On hand were 463 deputies, slightly more than one-half of those elected, among them 259 SRs, 136 Bolsheviks, and 40 Left SRs.† From the opening bell, the Bolshevik deputies and armed guards jeered and booed non-Bolshevik speakers. Many of the armed men who filled the corridors and the balcony did not have to force themselves to behave raucously, for they had helped themselves to the vodka generously dispensed at the buffet. The minutes of the Assembly open with the following scene:

A member of the Constituent Assembly, belonging to the SR faction, exclaims from his seat: “Comrades, it is now 4 p.m., we suggest that the oldest member open the meeting of the Constituent Assembly.” (Loud noise on the left, applause in the center and on the right, whistles on the left.… Inaudible.… Loud noise and whistles continue on the left and applause on the right.) The oldest member of the Constituent Assembly, Mikhailov, ascends [the podium].

Mikhailov rings. (Noise on the left. Voice: “Down with the usurper!” Continuing noise and whistles on the left, applause on the right.)

Mikhailov: “I declare an intermission.”¹²⁴

The Bolsheviks pursued a simple strategy. They would confront the Assembly with a resolution that would, in effect, delegitimize it: in the almost certain event that it failed, they would walk out, and without formally disbanding it, make further work by the Assembly impossible. Following this plan, F. F. Raskolnikov, the Bolshevik ensign from Kronshtadt, moved a motion. Although called “Declaration of the Rights of the Toiling and Exploited Masses,” unlike its 1789 prototype, it had more to say about duties than rights: it was here that the Bolsheviks introduced the universal labor obligation. Russia was proclaimed a “republic of soviets” and a number of measures which the Bolsheviks had previously passed were reconfirmed, among them the Land Decree, worker control over production, and the nationalization of banks. The critical article asked the Assembly to renounce its authority to legislate—the very authority for the sake of which it had been elected. “The Constituent Assembly concedes,” it read, “that its tasks are confined to working out in general the fundamental bases of reorganizing society on a socialist basis.” The Assembly was to ratify all the decrees previously issued by the Sovnarkom and then adjourn.¹²⁵

Raskolnikov’s motion lost 237–136: the vote indicates that all the Bolshevik delegates, but only they, voted in favor; the Left SRs apparently abstained. At this point, the Bolshevik delegation declared the Assembly to be controlled by “counterrevolutionaries” and walked out. The Left SRs kept their seats for the time being.

Lenin stayed in his loge until 10 p.m., when he, too, departed: he had not addressed the Assembly, so as not to give it any semblance of legitimacy. The Bolshevik Central Committee now met in another part of the palace and adopted a resolution dissolving the Assembly. Out of deference to the Left SRs, however, Lenin instructed the Taurida Guard not to use violence: any deputy who wished to leave the building was to be let go, but no one was to be allowed back in.¹²⁶ At 2 a.m., satisfied that the situation was under control, he returned to Smolnyi.

After the Bolsheviks had departed, Taurida resounded with interminable speeches, frequently disrupted by the guards who had descended from the balcony and filled the seats vacated by the Bolsheviks: many of them were drunk. Some soldiers amused themselves by aiming guns at the speakers. At 2:30 a.m. the Left SRs walked out, at which point commissar P. E. Dybenko, who was in charge of security, ordered the commander of the guard, a sailor, the anarchist A. G. Zhelezniakov, to close the meeting. Shortly after 4 a.m., as the chairman, Victor Chernov, was proclaiming the abolition of property in land, Zhelezniakov mounted the tribune and touched him on the back.* The following scene ensued, as recorded in the minutes:

Citizen Sailor: “I have been instructed to inform you that all those present should leave the Assembly Hall because the guard is tired.”

Chairman: “What instruction? From whom?”

Citizen Sailor: “I am the commander of the Taurida Guard. I have an instruction from the commissar.”

Chairman: “The members of the Constituent Assembly are also tired, but no fatigue can disrupt our proclaiming a law awaited by all of Russia.”

(Loud noise. Voices: “Enough, enough!”)

Chairman: “The Constituent Assembly can disperse only under the threat of force.”

(Noise.)

Chairman: “You declare it.”

(Voices: “Down with Chernov!”)

Citizen Sailor: “I request that the Assembly Hall be immediately vacated.”*

79. Victor Chernov.

While this exchange was taking place more Bolshevik troops crowded into the Assembly Hall, looking very menacing. Chernov managed to keep the meeting going for another twenty minutes, and then adjourned it until 5 p.m. that day (January 6). But the Assembly was not to reconvene, for in the morning Sverdlov had the CEC ratify the Bolshevik resolution dissolving it.¹²⁷ Pravda on that day appeared with banner headlines:

THE HIRELINGS OF BANKERS, CAPITALISTS, AND LANDLORDS, THE ALLIES OF KALEDIN, DUTOV, THE SLAVES OF THE AMERICAN DOLLAR, THE BACKSTAB-BERS—THE RIGHT SR’S—DEMAND IN THE CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY ALL POWER FOR THEMSELVES AND THEIR MASTERS—ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE.

THEY PAY LIP SERVICE TO POPULAR DEMANDS FOR LAND, PEACE, AND [WORKER] CONTROL, BUT IN REALITY THEY TRY TO FASTEN A NOOSE AROUND THE NECK OF SOCIALIST AUTHORITY AND REVOLUTION.

BUT THE WORKERS, PEASANTS, AND SOLDIERS WILL NOT FALL FOR THE BAIT OF LIES OF THE MOST EVIL ENEMIES OF SOCIALISM. IN THE NAME OF THE SOCIALIST REVOLUTION AND THE SOCIALIST SOVIET REPUBLIC THEY WILL SWEEP AWAY ITS OPEN AND HIDDEN KILLERS.¹²⁸

The Bolsheviks had previously linked Russian democratic forces with “capitalists,” “landlords,” and “counterrevolutionaries,” but in this headline they for the first time connected them also with foreign capital.

Two days later (January 8) the Bolsheviks opened their counter-Assembly, labeled “Third Congress of Soviets.” Here no one could obstruct them because they had reserved for themselves and the Left SRs 94 percent of the seats,¹²⁹ more than three times what they were entitled to, judging by the results of the elections to the Constituent Assembly. The little left over they allocated to the opposition socialists—just enough to have a target for abuse and ridicule. The congress duly passed all the measures submitted to it by government spokesmen, including the “Declaration of Rights.” Russia became a “Federation of Soviet Republics,” to be known as the “Russian Soviet Socialist Republic,” which name she retained until 1924, when she was renamed “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.” The congress acknowledged the Sovnarkom as the country’s legitimate governhient, removing from its name the adjective “provisional.” It also approved the principle of universal labor obligation.

The dissolution of the Assembly met with surprising indifference: there was none of the fury which in 1789 had greeted rumors that Louis XVI intended to dissolve the National Assembly, precipitating the assault on the Bastille. After a year of anarchy, Russians were exhausted: they yearned for peace and order, no matter how purchased. The Bolsheviks had gambled on that mood and won. After January 5, no one could any longer believe that Lenin’s men could be talked into abandoning power. And since there was no effective armed opposition to them in the central regions of Russia, and what there was the socialist intelligentsia refused to use, common sense dictated that the Bolshevik dictatorship was here to stay.

An immediate result was the collapse of the strike of white-collar personnel in the ministries and private enterprises, who drifted back to work after January 5, some driven by personal need, others in the belief that they would be better able to influence events from the inside. The psychology of the opposition now suffered a fatal break: it is as if brutality and the disregard of the nation’s will legitimized the Bolshevik dictatorship. The country at large felt that after a year of chaos, it at last had a “real” government. This certainly held true of the peasant and worker masses but, paradoxically, also of the well-to-do and conservative elements, Pravda’s “hyenas of capital” and “enemies of the people,” who despised the socialist intelligentsia and street mobs even more than they did the Bolsheviks.* In a sense the Bolsheviks may be said to have become the government of Russia not so much in October 1917 as in January 1918. In the words of one contemporary, “authentic, genuine Bolshevism, the Bolshevism of the broad masses, came only after January 5.”¹³⁰

Indeed, the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly was in many respects more important for the future of Russia than the October coup which had been carried out behind the smoke screen of “All Power to the Soviets.” If the purpose of October remained concealed from nearly everyone, including rank-and-file Bolsheviks, there could be no doubt about Bolshevik intentions after January 5, when they had made it unmistakably clear they intended to pay no heed to popular opinion. They did not have to listen to the voice of the people because, in the literal sense of the word, they were the “people.”^** In the words of Lenin, “The dispersal of the Constituent Assembly by Soviet authority [was] the complete and open liquidation of formal democracy in the name of the revolutionary dictatorship.”¹³¹

The response to this historic event on the part of the population at large and the intelligentsia augured ill for the country’s future. Russia, events confirmed once again, lacked a sense of national cohesion capable of inspiring the population to give up immediate and personal interests for the sake of the common good. The “popular masses” demonstrated that they understood only private and regional interests, the heady joys of the duvan, which were satisfied, for the time being, by the soviets and factory committees. In accord with the Russian proverb “He who grabs the stick is corporal,” they conceded power to the boldest and most ruthless claimant.

The evidence indicates that the industrial workers of Petrograd, even as they voted for the Bolshevik ticket, had expected the Assembly to meet and give shape to the country’s new political and social system. This is confirmed by their signatures on the various petitions of the Union for the Defense of the Constituent Assembly, Pravda’s complaints about workers’ support for it,¹³² and the frenetic appeals combined with threats which the Bolsheviks directed at the workers on the eve of the Assembly’s convocation. And yet, when confronted with the unflinching determination of the regime to liquidate the Assembly, backed with guns that did not hesitate to fire, the workers folded. Was it because they were betrayed by the intelligentsia, which urged them not to resist? If that was the case, then the role of intellectuals in the revolution against tsarism stands out in bold relief: without their prodding, it seems, Russian workers would not stand up to the government.

As for the peasants, they could not care less what went on in the big city. SR agitators told them to vote, so they voted; and if some other group of “white hands” took over, what difference did it make? Their concerns did not extend beyond the boundaries of their volosti.

That left the socialist intelligentsia, which, having gained a solid electoral victory, could act in confidence that the country was behind it. It was doomed by the refusal under any circumstances to resort to force against the Bolsheviks. Trotsky later taunted socialist intellectuals that they had come to Taurida Palace with candles, in case the Bolsheviks cut off power, and with sandwiches, in case they were deprived of food.¹³³ But they would not carry guns. On the eve of the convocation of the Assembly, the SR Pitirim Sorokin (later professor of sociology at Harvard), discussing the possibility of its being dispersed by force, predicted: “If the opening session is met with ‘machine guns,’ we will issue an appeal to the country informing it of this, and place ourselves under the protection of the people.”¹³⁴ But they lacked the courage even for such a gesture. When, following the dissolution of the Assembly, soldiers approached socialist deputies with the offer to restore it by force of arms, the horrified intellectuals begged them to do nothing of the kind: Tsereteli said that it would be better for the Constituent Assembly to die a quiet death than to provoke a civil war.¹³⁵ Such people no one could risk following: they talked endlessly of revolution and democracy, but would not defend their ideals with anything other than words and gestures. This contradictory behavior, this inertia disguised as submission to the forces of history, this unwillingness to fight and win, is not easy to explain. Perhaps its rationale has to be sought in the realm of psychology—namely, the traditional attitude of the old Russian intelligentsia so well depicted by Chekhov, with its dread of success and belief that inefficiency was “the cardinal virtue and defeat the only halo.”¹³⁶

The capitulation of the socialist intelligentsia on January 5 was the beginning of its demise. “The inability to defend the Constituent Assembly marked the most profound crisis of Russian democracy,” observed a man who had tried and failed to organize armed resistance. “It was the turning point. After January 5 there was no place in history, in Russian history, for what had been the idealistically dedicated Russian intelligentsia. It was relegated to the past.”¹³⁷

Unlike their opponents, the Bolsheviks learned a great deal from these events. They understood that in areas under their control they need fear no organized armed resistance: their rivals, though supported by at least three-fourths of the population, were disunited, leaderless, and, above all, unwilling to fight. This experience accustomed the Bolsheviks to resort to violence as a matter of course whenever they ran into resistance, to “solve” their problems by physically annihilating those who caused them. The machine gun became for them the principal instrument of political persuasion. The unrestrained brutality with which they henceforth ruled Russia stemmed in large measure from the knowledge, gained on January 5, that they could use it with impunity.

And they had to resort to brutality more and more often, for only a few months after they had assumed power their base of support began to erode: had they relied on popular backing, they would have gone the way of the Provisional Government. The industrial workers, who in the fall, along with the garrison troops, had been their strongest supporters, grew disenchanted very quickly. The change of mood had diverse causes, but the principal one was the worsening food situation. The government, having forbidden all private trade in cereals and bread, paid the peasant such absurdly low prices that he either hoarded the grain or disposed of it on the black market. The government did not obtain enough foodstuffs to supply the urban population with anything but the barest minimum: in the winter of 1917–18, the bread ration in Petrograd fluctuated between four and six ounces a day. On the black market, a pound of bread fetched from three to five rubles, which placed it out of the reach of ordinary people. There was massive industrial unemployment as well, caused mainly by fuel shortages: in May 1918 only 12–13 percent of the Petrograd labor force still held jobs.¹³⁸

To escape starvation and cold, thousands of city inhabitants fled to the countryside, where they had relatives and the food and fuel situation was better. Due to this exodus, by April 1918 the labor force in Petrograd declined to 57 percent of what it had been on the eve of the February Revolution.¹³⁹ Those who stayed behind, hungry, cold, often idle, seethed with discontent. They resented Bolshevik economic policies which had produced this state of affairs, but they also objected to the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, the humiliating peace treaty with the Central Powers (signed in March 1918), the high-handed behavior of Bolshevik commissars, and the scandalous corruption of officials on all but the highest levels of government.

This development had dangerous implications for the Bolsheviks, the more so in that the armed forces on which they had previously relied were all but gone as spring approached. The soldiers who did not return home formed marauding bands that terrorized the population and sometimes assaulted soviet officials.

The growing mood of disenchantment and the feeling that they could not obtain redress from existing institutions, firmly in Bolshevik hands, prompted the Petrograd workers to create new institutions, independent of the Bolsheviks and the bodies (soviets, trade unions, Factory Committees) which they controlled. On January 5/18, 1918—the day the Constituent Assembly opened—representatives or “plenipotentiaries” of Petrograd factories met to discuss the current situation. Some speakers referred to a “break” in worker attitudes.¹⁴⁰ In February, these plenipotentiaries began to hold regular meetings. Incomplete evidence indicates one such meeting in March, four in April, three in May, and three in June. The March meeting of delegates representing fifty-six factories, for which records exist,¹⁴¹ heard strong anti-Bolshevik language. It protested that the government, while claiming to rule on behalf of workers and peasants, exercised autocratic authority and refused to hold new elections to the soviets. It called for a rejection of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, the dissolution of the Sovnarkom, and the immediate convocation of the Constituent Assembly.

On March 31 the Bolsheviks had the Cheka search the headquarters of the Council of Workers’ Plenipotentiaries and impound the literature found there. Otherwise they did not interfere as yet, probably from fear of provoking worker unrest.

Aware that the urban workers were turning against them, the Bolsheviks delayed holding soviet elections. When some independent soviets did so anyway, producing non-Bolshevik majorities, they disbanded them by force. The inability to use the soviets compounded the workers’ frustration. In early May, many concluded that they had to take matters into their own hands.

On May 8, massive worker assemblies were held at the Putilov and Obukhov plants to discuss the two most burning issues: food and politics. At Putilov, over 10,000 workers heard denunciations of the government. Bolshevik speakers were given a hostile reception and their resolutions went down in defeat. The meeting demanded the “immediate unification of all socialist and democratic forces,” the lifting of restrictions on free trade in bread, fresh elections to the Constituent Assembly, and reelections to the Petrograd Soviet by secret ballot.¹⁴² Obukhov workers passed, with a virtually unanimous vote, a similar resolution.¹⁴³

The next day an event occurred at Kolpino, an industrial town south of Petrograd, which added fuel to growing worker discontent. Kolpino had been especially badly served by government supply agencies: and with only 300 of the city’s work force of 10,000 employed, few had money to buy food on the black market. A further delay in food deliveries provoked the women to call a city-wide protest. The Bolshevik commissar lost his head and ordered troops to fire on the demonstrators. In the ensuing panic the impression spread that there were numerous dead, although, as transpired later, there was only one fatality and six injured.¹⁴⁴ By standards of the time, nothing extraordinary: but Petrograd workers needed little cause to give vent to pent-up anger.

Having heard from emissaries sent by Kolpino what had happened there, the major Petrograd factories suspended work. The Obukhov workers passed a resolution condemning the government and demanding an end to the “rule of commissars” (komissaroderzhavie). Zinoviev, the boss of Petrograd (the government having in March moved to Moscow), put in an appearance at Putilov. “I have heard,” he told the workers, “of alleged resolutions having been adopted here charging the Soviet Government with pursuing incorrect policies. But one can change the Soviet Government at any time!” At these words the audience broke into an uproar: “It’s a lie!” A Putilov worker named Izmailov accused the Bolsheviks of pretending to speak for the Russian workers while humiliating them in the eyes of the whole civilized world.¹⁴⁵ A gathering at the Arsenal approved 1,500–2 with 11 abstentions a motion to reconvene the Constituent Assembly.¹⁴⁶

The Bolsheviks still prudently kept in the background. But to prevent these inflammatory resolutions from spreading, they shut down, permanently or temporarily, a number of opposition newspapers, four of them in Moscow. The Kadet Nash vek, which reported extensively on these events, was suspended from May 10 to June 16.

Since they planned to hold the Fifth Congress of Soviets early in July (the Fourth Congress having been held in March to ratify the peace treaty with Germany), the Bolsheviks had to hold elections to the soviets. These took place in May and June. The outcome exceeded their worst expectations: had they any respect for the wishes of the working class, they would have given up power. In town after town, Bolshevik candidates were routed by Mensheviks and SRs: “In all provincial capitals of European Russia where elections were held on which there are data, the Mensheviks and SRs won the majorities in the city soviets in the spring of 1918.”¹⁴⁷ In the voting for the Moscow Soviet the Bolsheviks emerged with a pseudo-majority only by means of outright manipulation of the franchise and other forms of electoral fraud. Observers predicted that in the forthcoming elections to the Petrograd Soviet the Bolsheviks would find themselves in a minority as well¹⁴⁸ and Zinoviev would lose its chairmanship. The Bolsheviks must have shared this pessimistic assessment, for they postponed the elections to the Petrograd Soviet to the last possible moment, the end of June.

These stunning developments meant not so much an endorsement of the Mensheviks and SRs as a rejection of the Bolsheviks. The electors who wanted to turn the ruling party out of power had no alternative but to vote for the socialist parties since they alone were permitted to put up opposition candidates. How they would have voted had they been given a full choice of parties cannot, of course, be determined.

The Bolsheviks now had an opportunity to practice the principle of “recall,” which Lenin had not long before described as “an essential condition of democracy,” by withdrawing their deputies from the soviets and replacing them with Mensheviks and SRs. But they chose to manipulate the results, by using the Mandate Commissions, to declare the elections unlawful.

To distract the workers, the authorities had resorted to class hatred, inciting them this time against the “rural bourgeoisie.” On May 20, the Sovnarkom issued a decree ordering the formation of “food supply detachments” (prodovol’stvennye otriady), made up of armed workers, which were to march on the villages and extract food from “kulaks.” By this measure (it will be described in greater detail in Chapter 16) the authorities hoped to deflect the workers’ anger over food shortages from themselves to the peasants, and, at the same time, gain a foothold in the countryside, still solidly under SR control.

Petrograd workers were not taken in by this diversion. Their plenipotentiaries on May 24 rejected the idea of food supply detachments on the grounds that it would cause a “deep chasm” between workers and peasants. Some speakers demanded that workers who joined such detachments be “expelled” from the ranks of the proletariat.¹⁴⁹

On May 28, the excitement among Petrograd workers rose to a still higher pitch when the workers of Putilov demanded an end to the state’s grain monopoly, guarantees of free speech, the right to form independent trade unions, and fresh elections to the soviets. Protest meetings which passed similar resolutions took place in Moscow and many provincial towns, including Tula, Nizhnii Novgorod, Orel, and Tver.

Zinoviev tried to calm the storm with economic concessions. He apparently persuaded Moscow to allocate to Petrograd additional food shipments, for on May 30 he was able to announce that the daily bread ration of workers would be raised to eight ounces. Such gestures failed to achieve their purpose. On June 1, the meeting of plenipotentiaries resolved to call for a city-wide political strike:

Having heard the report of the representatives of factories and plants of Petrograd concerning the mood and demands of the worker masses, the Council of Plenipotentiaries notes with gratification that the withdrawal of the mass of workers from the government that falsely calls itself a government of workers is proceeding apace. The Council of Plenipotentiaries welcomes the readiness of workers to follow its appeal for a political strike. The Council of Plenipotentiaries calls on the workers of Petrograd vigorously to prepare the worker masses for a political strike against the current regime, which, in the name of the worker class, executes workers, throws them into prison, strangles freedom of speech, of press, of trade unions, [and] of strikes, which has strangled the popular representative body. This strike will have as its slogan the transfer of authority to the Constituent Assembly, the restoration of the organs of local self-government, the struggle for the integrity and independence of the Russian Republic.¹⁵⁰

This, of course, was what the Mensheviks had been waiting for: workers, disenchanted with Bolsheviks, striking for democracy. Initially they did not favor the plenipotentiary movement because its leaders, suspicious of politicians, wanted independence from political parties. But by April they were sufficiently impressed to throw support behind the movement: on May 16, the Menshevik Central Committee called for the convocation of a nationwide conference of workers’ representatives.* ¹⁵¹ The SRs followed suit.

If the situation were reversed, with the socialists in power and the Bolsheviks in opposition, the Bolsheviks undoubtedly would have encouraged worker discontent and done all they could to topple the government. But the Mensheviks and their socialist allies had strong inhibitions against such behavior. They rejected the Bolshevik dictatorship and yet felt beholden to it. The Menshevik Novaia zhizn’, while unsparing in its criticism, made its readers understand that they had a vital interest in the survival of Bolshevism. This thesis it had expressed the day after the Bolshevik power seizure:

It is essential, above all, to take into account the tragic fact that any violent liquidation of the Bolshevik coup will, at the same time, result inevitably in the liquidation of all the conquests of the Russian Revolution.¹⁵²

After the Bolsheviks had disposed of the Constituent Assembly, the Menshevik organ lamented:

We did not belong and do not belong to the admirers of the Bolshevik regime, and have always predicted the bankruptcy of its foreign and domestic policies. But neither have we forgotten nor do we forget for an instant that the fate of our revolution is closely tied to that of the Bolshevik movement. The Bolshevik movement represents a perverted, degenerate revolutionary striving of the broad popular masses …¹⁵³

Such an attitude not only paralyzed the Mensheviks’ will to act but made them into allies of the Bolsheviks, in that instead of fanning the flames of popular discontent, they helped put them out.*

When the Council of Workers’ Plenipotentiaries reassembled on June 3, the Menshevik and SR intellectuals opposed the idea of a political strike, on the familiar grounds that it would play into the hands of the class enemy. They persuaded the workers’ representatives to reconsider their decision and, instead of striking, send a delegation to Moscow to explore the possibility of founding a similar organization there.

On June 7, a delegate from Petrograd addressed a gathering of Moscow factory representatives; he accused the Bolshevik Government of pursuing anti-labor and counterrevolutionary policies. Such talk had not been heard in Russia since October. The Cheka viewed the matter very seriously, for Moscow was now the country’s capital and unrest there was more dangerous than in “Red Petrograd.” Security agents seized the Petrograd delegate when he finished speaking, but were forced to release him under pressure from fellow workers. It transpired that Moscow labor, although sympathetic, was not yet ready to form its own Council of Workers’ Plenipotentiaries.¹⁵⁴ This may be explainable by the fact that the labor force in Moscow and surrounding areas had lower skills and weaker traditions of trade unionism than the workers in Petrograd.

The process of worker disengagement from the soviets, begun in Petrograd, spread to the rest of the country. In many cities (Moscow was soon among them) where the local soviets were prevented from holding elections or where the elections had been disqualified, workers formed “workers’ councils,” “workers’ conferences,” or “assemblies of workers’ plenipotentiaries” free of government control and unaffiliated with any political party.

Faced with a rising tide of discontent, the Bolsheviks struck back. In Moscow on June 13, they took into custody fifty-six individuals affiliated with the plenipotentiary movement, all but six or seven of them workers.¹⁵⁵ On June 16, they announced the convocation in two weeks of the Fifth Congress of Soviets, and in this connection instructed all soviets to hold new elections once again. Since such elections would certainly have again yielded Menshevik and SR majorities and placed the government in the position of an embattled minority at the Congress, Moscow moved to disqualify its rivals by ordering the expulsion of SRs and Mensheviks from all the soviets as well as from the CEC.¹⁵⁶ At the caucus of the Bolshevik faction of the CEC, L. S. Sosnovskii justified the decree with the argument that the Mensheviks and SRs would overthrow the Bolsheviks just as the Bolsheviks had toppled the Provisional Government.* The only choice offered the voters, therefore, was among official Bolshevik candidates, Left SRs, and a broad category of candidates without party affiliation known as “Bolshevik sympathizers.”

This step marked the end of independent political parties in Russia. The monarchist parties—Octobrists, Union of the Russian People, Nationalists—had dissolved in the course of 1917 and no longer existed as organized bodies. The outlawed Kadets either shifted their activities to the borderlands, where they were beyond the reach of the Cheka, but also out of touch with the Russian population, or else went underground, where they formed an anti-Bolshevik coalition called the National Center.¹⁵⁷ The June 16 decree did not explicitly outlaw the Mensheviks and SRs but it did render them politically impotent. Although, as a reward for their support against the White armies, the two socialist parties were later reinstated and allowed to rejoin the soviets in limited numbers, this was a temporary expedient. Essentially, Russia now became a one-party state in which organizations other than the Bolshevik Party were forbidden to engage in political activity.

On June 16, the day the Bolsheviks announced the Fifth Congress of Soviets, which neither the Mensheviks nor the SRs would attend, the Council of Workers’ Plenipotentiaries called for the convocation of an All-Russian Conference of Workers.¹⁵⁸ This body was to discuss and solve the most urgent problems facing the nation: the food situation, unemployment, the breakdown of law, and workers’ organizations.

On June 20, the head of the Petrograd Cheka, V. Volodarskii, was assassinated. In its search for the killer, the Cheka detained some workers, which set off protest meetings in factories. The Bolsheviks occupied the Neva worker district with troops and imposed martial law. The workers of Obukhov, the most troublesome factory, were locked out.¹⁵⁹

It was in this highly charged atmosphere that elections to the Soviet took place in Petrograd. During the electoral campaign, Zinoviev was booed and prevented from speaking at Putilov and Obukhov. In factory after factory, workers, ignoring the decree prohibiting the two parties from participating in the soviets, gave majorities to Mensheviks and SRs. Obukhov chose 5 SRs, 3 partyless, and 1 Bolshevik. At Semiannikov, the SRs won 64 percent of the vote, the Mensheviks 10 percent, and the Bolshevik–Left SR bloc 26 percent. Similar results were obtained in other establishments.¹⁶⁰

The Bolsheviks refused to be bound by these results. They wanted majorities and obtained them, usually by tampering with the franchise: some Bolsheviks were given as many as five votes.* On July 2, the results of the “elections” were announced. Of the 650 newly chosen deputies to the Petrograd Soviet, 610 were to be Bolsheviks and Left SRs; 40 seats were allotted to the SRs and Mensheviks, whom the official organs denounced as “Judases.”† This rump Petrograd Soviet voted to dissolve the Council of Workers’ Plenipotentiaries: a delegate from the council who sought to address the gathering was prevented from speaking and physically assaulted.

The Council of Workers’ Plenipotentiaries sat in almost daily session. On June 26, it voted unanimously to call for a one-day political strike on July 2, under the slogans “Down with the Death Penalty,” “Down with Executions and the Civil War,” “Long Live the Freedom to Strike.”¹⁶¹ SR and Menshevik intellectuals again came out against the strike.¹⁶²

The Bolshevik authorities posted placards all over the city which described the organizers of the strike as hirelings of White Guardists and threatened to turn all strikers over to Revolutionary Tribunals.¹⁶³ For good measure they set up machine gun posts at key points in the city.

Sympathetic reporters described the workers as vacillating: the Kadet Nash vek wrote on June 22 that they were anti-Soviet but confused. The difficult domestic and international situation, food shortages, and the absence of clear solutions induced in them “an extreme imbalance, a depression of sorts, and even perplexity.”

The events of July 2 confirmed this assessment. The first political strike in Russia since the fall of tsarism sputtered and went out. The workers, discouraged by socialist intellectuals, intimidated by the Bolshevik show of force, uncertain of their strength and purpose, lost heart. The organizers estimated that between 18,000 and 20,000 workers obeyed the call to strike, which was no more than one-seventh of Petrograd’s actual labor force. Obkuhov, Maxwell, and Pahl struck, but most of the other plants, Putilov included, did not.

This result sealed the fate of independent workers’ organizations in Russia. Before long, the Cheka closed down the Council of Workers’ Plenipotentiaries in Petrograd along with its provincial branches, sending the most outspoken leaders to prison.

Thus ended the autonomy of the soviets, the right of workers to their own representation, and what was still left of the multiparty system. These measures, enacted in June and early July 1918, completed the formation in Russia of a one-party dictatorship.

*This device was surprisingly successful with foreigners. In the 1920s Communist Russia was widely perceived by foreign socialists and liberals as a democratic government of a new, “soviet” type. Early visitors’ accounts rarely mentioned the Communist Party and its dominant role, so effectively was it concealed.

†Hitler, who fashioned the Nationalist-Socialist Party closely on the Bolshevik and Fascist models, told Hermann Rauschning that the term “party” was really a misnomer for his organization. He preferred it to be called “an order”: Rauschning, Hitler Speaks (London, 1939), 198, 243.

*B. Eltsin in VS, No. 6/7 (May 1919), 9–10. The author claims that these institutions, created on orders of the Central Committee and the government, initiated the process of the “gathering of the Russian lands,” a term traditionally applied to early modern Moscow.

*These tendencies were exacerbated by the government’s refusal to fund provincial soviets. In February 1918, Petrograd responded to the requests from provincial soviets for money by telling them that they should obtain it by “mercilessly” taxing the propertied classes: PR, No. 3/38 (1925), 161–62. This order led local authorities to levy arbitrary “contributions” on the “bourgeoisie” in their area.

*W. Pietsch, Revolution und Staat (Köln, 1969), 63. The old CEC, disbanded by the Bolsheviks, continued to meet, sometimes in the open, sometimes clandestinely, until the end of December 1917: Revoliutsiia, III, 90–91.

*The Left SRs on this occasion voted against him: Revoliutsiia, VI, 99.

†Dekrety, I, 24–25. Lunacharskii is credited with its authorship by Iurii Larin in NKh, No. 11 (1918), 16–17.

*Dekrety, I, 29–30. The date when the decree was issued cannot be established: it appeared in the Bolshevik press on October 31 and November 1, 1917.

*A. L. Fraiman, Forpost sotsialisticheskoi revoliutsii (Leningrad, 1969), 169–70. The Bolsheviks took the precaution of increasing their representation on the CEC with five reliable members (Revoliutsiia, VI, 72).

*In December 1919, the few powers still nominally vested in the CEC were transferred to its chairman, who thereby became “head of state.” CEC meetings, which originally had been intended to be continuous, took place ever less frequently: in 1921, the CEC met only three times. See E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, I (New York, 1951), 220–30.

†“kak pravitel’stvo”: L. Trotskii, O Lenine (Moscow, 1924), 102. The English translator distorted this passage to read that Lenin “acted as a government should”: L. Trotsky, Lenin (New York, 1971), 121.

‡As we shall note below, there were exceptions to this rule.

*According to Professor John Keep, in the first eighteen weeks in power—that is, until early March 1918 when he moved to Moscow—Lenin left Smolnyi only twenty-one times-. Report presented at the Conference on the Russian Revolution, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, January 1988.

*BK, No. 1 (1934), 107. Jay Lovestone, a founder of the American Communist Party, told the author that once, when speaking with Lenin, he used three-by-five cards. Lenin wanted to know their purpose. When Lovestone explained that, to save Lenin’s time, he had written down on them what he intended to say, Lenin said that Communism would come to Russia when she too learned to use three-by-five cards.

†S. Liberman, Building Lenin’s Russia (Chicago, 1945), 13. The minutes of the Sovnarkom, which, next to the protocols of the Bolshevik Central Committee, constitute the most important source on early Bolshevik policies, are preserved at the Central Party Archive (TsPA) of the Marx-Lenin Institute in Moscow, under the shelf mark “Fond 19.” They are made available only to the most trusted Communist historians. Others must rely on secondhand references, such as those contained (in very incomplete form) in the biographical chronicle of Lenin’s life: Institut Marksizma-Leninizma pri TsK KPSS, Vladimir Il’ich Lenin: Biograficheskaia Khronika, 1870–1924, V-XII (Moscow, 1974–82). See further E. B. Genkina, Protokoly Sovnarkoma RSFSR (Moscow, 1982).

*DN, No. 222 (December 2, 1917), 3. The protocols of this congress have not been published: the fullest description of the proceedings, on which the following account is based, appeared in the SR daily, Delo naroda, November 20-December 13, 1917.

†DN, No. 223 (December 3/16, 1917), 3. The Communist chronicle of the Revolution (Revoliutsiia, VI, 258) distorts the sense of this resolution when it claims that the SRs demanded that power be taken away from the soviets and turned over to the Constituent Assembly. The SRs, in fact, wanted the Assembly and the soviets to cooperate.

* Vtoroi S’ezd RSDSRP: Protokoly (Moscow, 1959), 181–82. Trotsky in 1903 said something similar: “All democratic principles must be subordinated exclusively to the interests of the party.” (M. Vishniak, Bolshevism and Democracy, New York, 1914, 67.)

*O. N. Znamenskii, Vserossiiskoe Uchreditel’noe Sobranie (Leningrad, 1976), 338. Much of the Left SR support came from Petrograd workers and radicalized sailors in the Baltic and Black Sea navies.

*E. Ignatov, in PR, No. 5/76 (1928), 37. The author claims that these worker signatures were forged but furnishes no proof.

*Kerensky was, in fact, in Petrograd at this time, but there is no evidence that he tried to organize anti-Bolshevik forces.

*NZh, No. 6/220 (January 9/22, 1918), 1. Afraid of a backlash, the Bolsheviks ordered an inquiry into the shooting. It revealed that troops from the Lithuanian Regiment had fired on the demonstrators in the belief that in so doing they were defending the Assembly from “saboteurs” (NZh, No. 15/229, February 3, 1918, 11). The Commission of Inquiry discontinued its work at the end of January without issuing a report.

†Znamenskii, Uchreditel’noe Sobranie, 339. The exact number of the deputies present is not known: it could have been as low as 410: Ibid.

*Zhelezniakov was a leader of the anarchists who had occupied Peter Durnovo’s villa the previous year and whose arrest caused the Kronshtadt sailors in June 1917 to revolt: Revoliutsiia, III, 108.

*I. S. Malchevskii, ed., Vserossiiskoe Uchreditel’noe Sobranie (Moscow-Leningrad, 1930), no. Zhelezniakov was killed the following year, fighting in the Red Army.

*In May 1918, Vladimir Purishkevich, one of the most reactionary pre-revolutionary politicians, published an open letter in which he said that after having spent half a year in Soviet prison he remained a monarchist and would offer no apologies for the Soviet Government which was transforming Russia into a German colony. However, he went on, “Soviet authority is firm authority—alas, not from that direction which I would prefer to have firm authority in Russia, whose pitiful and cowardly intelligentsia is one of the main culprits of our humiliation and of the inability of Russian society to produce a healthy, firm authority of governmental scope’: letter dated May 1, 1918, in VO, No. 36 (May 3, 1918), 4.

*This attitude was pointed out by Martov in the spring of 1918 when Stalin accused him of slander and brought suit before a Revolutionary Tribunal. Noting that these tribunals had been set up to try exclusively “crimes against the people,” Martov asked: “Can an insult to Stalin be considered a crime against the people?” And he answered: “Only if one considers Stalin to be the people”: “Narod eto ia,” Vperëd, April 1/14, 1918, 1.

*The idea of a Workers’ Congress had been first advanced by Akselrod in 1906, at which time it was rejected by both Mensheviks and Bolsheviks: Leonard Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (London, 1963), 75–76.

*In fairness it must be noted that a small group of old Mensheviks, among whom were the founders of Russian Social-Democracy—Plekhanov, Akselrod, Potresov, and Vera Zasulich—thought differently. Thus, Akselrod wrote in August 1918 that the Bolshevik regime had degenerated into a “gruesome” counterrevolution. Even so, he and his old Genevan comrades also opposed active resistance to Lenin, on the grounds that it would assist reactionary elements to return to power. A. Ascher, Pavel Axelrod and the Development of Menshevism (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), 344–46. On Plekhanov’s attitude: Samuel H. Baron, Plekhanov (Stanford, Calif., 1963), 352–61. Potresov criticized his Menshevik colleagues then and later (V plenu u illiuzii, Paris, 1927), but he, too, would not participate in active opposition.

*NZh, No. 115/330 (June 16, 1918), 3. According to NV, No. 96/120 (June 19, 1918), 3, the Bolshevik faction of the CEC refused to eject the Mensheviks and SRs from the soviets but consented to their expulsion from the CEC.

*V. Stroev in NZh, No. 119/334 (June 21, 1918), 1. According to one newspaper (Novyi luch, cited in NZh, No. 121/336, June 23, 1918, 1–2), of the 130 delegates initially “elected” to the Petrograd Soviet, 77 were handpicked by the Bolshevik Party: 26 from Red Army units, 8 from supply detachments, and 43 from among Bolshevik functionaries.

†NZh, No. 127/342 (July 2, 1918), 1. Somewhat different figures are given in Lenin, Sochineniia, XXIII, 547, where the total number of deputies is placed at 582, of whom 405 were Bolsheviks, 75 Left SRs, 59 Mensheviks and SRs, and 43 partyless.