An inevitable offshoot of the restriction of industrial democracy was the death of the most independent, rampantly democratic bodies of alclass="underline" the Soviets. Alexander Rabinowitch’s granular study of Petrograd’s First City District Soviet found that “the breakdown of democratic practices and the bureaucratisation of political affairs began almost at once after October, and certainly well before the explosion of what is usually considered the civil war crisis in May and June 1918”.25 But the picture was complex. Working-class socialists struggled, in the most challenging conditions, to transform society from the bottom up. Rabinowitch concedes that in spite of the erosion of democratic practices the system of local government introduced by the District Soviet was–at least until 1919–a genuine revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat, run and staffed by people of working-class origin committed to meaningful revolutionary change.
The Petrograd First City District Soviet covered 25% of the land area of Petrograd and was responsible for over half a million people. After October it entirely replaced local Dumas and municipal boards. It had its own departments for housing and resettlement; social welfare including pensions, care of orphans and food kitchens; culture and education; and a legal section to determine exactly how Sovnarcom’s decrees would be implemented.26 And yet the more governmental responsibility city and regional Soviets took on, the more their democratic freedom was curtailed. Sovnarcom was not about to let the Mensheviks or SRs run a large part of Petrograd, nor any other large city.
This was made brutally clear between March and June 1918, in “a unique period of multi-party elections to the Soviets”.27 A Sovnarcom decree of 5th January declared, “The entire country must be covered with a network of new Soviets”, and explained that all Soviets were now invested with the powers of former local and regional government. At the Seventh Party Congress in March 1918 Lenin stressed that the Soviets were the basis of a new form of state. He told the Congress:
Soviet power is a new type of state without a bureaucracy, without police, without a regular army, a democracy that brings to the fore the vanguard of the working people, gives them legislative and executive authority, makes them responsible for military defence, and creates machinery that can re-educate the masses.28
Lenin’s vision, at least initially, was one of genuine social emancipation, of the raising up of the downtrodden through organs of self-rule. That vision died on the vine. The Soviets had real powers but Lenin never claimed they would always reflect the will of the majority of workers who could participate in them. If Soviets exercised their powers by voting for non-Bolshevik majorities or questioning the direction of Sovnarcom’s policies, that power was swiftly removed. The hostile reaction to the closing of the Constituent Assembly and the Brest-Litovsk treaty made the government back off on overt repression for a short while. This led to an explosion of democracy amongst the only bodies left in the state that could express it, and a direct challenge to the government.
In the Central Industrial Region during this period the Menshevik party won elections to every city Soviet in which elections were allowed. With the propertied classes denied the vote, this attests to a major increase in its working-class and peasant base of support in a very short time. The consequences of this support were demonstrated in the provincial town of Kaluga, where the Mensheviks demanded Bolshevik commissars provide an account of their expenditure of Soviet funds. In response, all the Menshevik deputies of the Kaluga Soviet were arrested as they sat in the Palace of Labour. Such was the local outrage that they had to be released the next day. After this their support increased again until on 8th June, when all Mensheviks and SRs were expelled permanently from the Kaluga Soviet.29 All across the region the Bolsheviks lost town and city Soviets to the Mensheviks and SRs. In Kostroma, Tver, Ryazan, Tula, Yaroslavl and other towns the results were the same. The Bolsheviks now had a choice–accept the outcome of the votes of an exclusively worker-peasant constituency or reject them and rely on state violence to cling to power. Violence was chosen.
In Kostroma, the Bolsheviks had a majority in the Soviet until March 1918. The Kostroma Mensheviks demanded a relaxation of state control over bread prices and removal of the ban on workers travelling out of town to purchase food. The result was that on 23rd May the Mensheviks and SRs gained a majority on the local Soviet. After an internal debate in which some Bolsheviks argued they must respect the people’s wishes and give up their seats on the Executive, a majority refused to do so. Instead, Kostroma’s Bolsheviks issued a bulletin which said they had “taken power without relying on the majority in the Soviet”. It finished, “Since the events of May 23rd we have stopped talking to the Mensheviks and SRs as comrades and we have started talking to them with the language of power”.30 The “language of power” consisted of bringing in armed Cheka units to raid the offices of the local Menshevik newspaper and arrest Kostroma’s leading Mensheviks.
In the industrial city of Tula, dominated by two large armaments factories of 40,000 workers, the Mensheviks were so strong that it took until December 1917 for the Bolsheviks to establish control of the city. Even then the Mensheviks held a majority in the Soviet. A special conference of workers discussed issues ranging from unemployment to wages to how to manage the problems arising from BrestLitovsk. The conference drew up a series of demands, including the re-establishment of a democratic republic, the recall of the Constituent Assembly, measures against unemployment, and organisation of the country to defend against German aggression. This level of independence could not be allowed, and the Bolsheviks quickly shut down the Menshevik paper Narodnyi Golos, raided and smashed up the Menshevik local party’s HQ and a worker’s social club, and made further arrests.31
In Yaraslavl suppression was even more violent. Since October 1917 the Bolsheviks had held a majority in the city’s Soviet, but they refused to allow new elections. After the Mensheviks kept pressing for elections, the Commander of the Yaraslavl Red Guards publically announced, “Those who are spreading Menshevik counter-revolutionary literature will be shot on the spot”. The intimidation failed, and new elections were called on 9th April, in which the Mensheviks secured 47 seats to the Bolsheviks’ 38 and the SRs’ 13. Following the result, the Bolshevik chair of the Soviet Executive declared the election null and void and the Soviet itself illegal. The reaction of Yaraslavl workers was immediate–a conference was called to defend the Soviet and some workers took strike action in protest at its closure. After these strikers were all dismissed the protest spread to other factories and plants, shops, streetcars, printing shops and the railways. Following this, new elections were held in which the Mensheviks secured four times as many votes as the Bolsheviks. This was the final straw for the Bolsheviks, who closed down the Soviet and declared martial law.
The same pattern was followed in Kovrov, where marches by striking workers demanding new elections were fired upon by Red Guards. And in Roslavl, where in May 1918 after elections returned a Menshevik majority, the Menshevik deputies were refused admittance to the Soviet by armed Red Guards. After a strike by railway workers in protest, the Red Guards attacked a strikers’ rally, then arrested and shot several strike leaders.32 In Rostov-on-Don, a broad-based Bolshevik-led MRC had seized power in the city after 25th October and fought off General Kaledin’s military forces. When Red Guards entered the city in February 1918 and tried to take over, they managed to alienate not just Rostov’s citizens but also the MRC, who had believed that the purpose of the revolution was to transfer “all power to the Soviets”. After Red Guards attempted to shut down the Soviet, the Bolshevik MRC joined forces with Mensheviks and SRs to fight them off. After months of civil strife in the city, the Mensheviks won Soviet elections in April 1918 on a platform of returning to democratic local government, whereupon the Red Guards disbanded the Soviet entirely and declared the Mensheviks and SRs counter-revolutionaries.33