Promulgation of the Decree gave the government a plausible answer to the criticisms of the EAD and Factory Committees that it had backtracked on the promises of October and left the old bosses in charge, but it also laid the ground for Lenin’s own form of state-controlled public ownership. After the Decree it was indisputable that there had been a revolutionary change in property relations. To the end of his life Trotsky would defend the Soviet Union as a “deformed workers’ state” on the grounds that this fundamental transfer had occurred and not been reversed. Sadly, it manifested itself not in democratic workers’ control but in top-heavy state direction often imposed by oneman management. The one man worked for the state but many workers saw little difference from the old private management hierarchies.
The Decree on Nationalisation was accompanied by decisive action to repel the general strike. Machine gun regiments were stationed at railway junctions, EAD meetings were dispersed by force and its leading activists arrested. Printing plants suspected of EAD sympathies were closed. The head offices of any trade union that supported the EAD were raided and their staff arrested. Armed patrols with authority to prevent strikes were deployed around the city. The strike collapsed before it had started and the EAD threat had been dissolved. The EAD Bureau issued a hasty statement that concluded bitterly, “no government in the Russia of the Romanovs had ever taken such extreme measures to thwart a strike as the Soviet government had”.
One of the key reasons the Bolsheviks ultimately prevailed over their opponents was that the Mensheviks’ own version of state-directed democratic socialism, whilst it valued the independence of the unions and the Soviets, had little in common with the anarcho-syndicalism of the Factory Committees. Although the Factory Committees would have found a role within a democratically administered socialist system easier than within a Bolshevik one, many advocates of workers’ control distrusted the Mensheviks as much as the Bolsheviks. Thus the two great poles of working-class resistance to Bolshevik authoritarianism–the Menshevik activists of the EAD and the militant Factory Committees–did not act in synergy. Yet despite the lack of coordinated political objectives the upsurge of working-class activity in the EAD and the campaigns to defend the right of the Soviets to elect Menshevik majorities were the true heir and continuation of pre-October proletarian radicalism.
The discontent against Sovnarcom had not been confined solely to the Mensheviks. On 20th April, 1918 the Petrograd District Committee of the Bolshevik Party published the first issue of Kommunist, a journal of Left Communism edited by Bukharin and Radek which took a stand against the “labour discipline” that Sovnarcom sought to impose. Warning of “bureaucratic centralization, the rule of the commissars, the loss of independence for local Soviets and the rejection of the state-commune administered from below”, Radek wrote:
If the Russian Revolution were overthrown by violence on the part of bourgeois counter-revolution, it would rise again like a phoenix; if however it lost its socialist character and thereby disappointed the working masses, the blow would have ten times more terrible consequences for the future of the Russian and international revolution.41
A coordinated storm of abuse from Lenin loyalists ensured that Kommunist had to transfer its operations to Moscow. Even there it could only produce three more issues before it was forced to shut down permanently.
Lenin’s own vision of socialism was set out with brutal clarity in his most important post-October statement, published in Izvestia on 28th April as “The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government”. It was a complete rejection of Left Communism. Lenin stressed the primary task of the working class was to learn how to administer a large modern economy efficiently, whilst also dealing with the crippling problems left over from the war: mass unemployment, industrial collapse, food shortages and famine. For Lenin, socialism was primarily a task of “accounting and control”. He explained:
The centre of gravity of our struggle against the bourgeoisie is shifting to the organisation of such accounting and control. Only with this as our starting point will it be possible to determine the immediate tasks of economic and financial policy in the sphere of nationlisation of the banks, monopolisation of foreign trade, the state control of money circulation […] and the introduction of compulsory labour service.
The key problem was indiscipline and lack of order. “It is now particularly clear to us”, he wrote, “how correct is the Marxist thesis that anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism are bourgeois trends, how irreconcilably opposed they are to socialism, proletarian dictatorship and communism”. On top of this, he wrote, “The Russian is a bad worker compared with people in advanced countries”, and so the productivity of labour was low. The solution was “unity of will”. Lenin considered that
the technical, economic and historical necessity of this is obvious, and all those who have thought about socialism have always regarded it as one of the conditions of socialism. But how can strict unity of will be ensured? By thousands subordinating their will to the will of one.
Lenin lamented that Sovnarcom was “late in introducing compulsory labour service”. He was adamant that workers demonstrate “obedience, and unquestioning obedience at that, during work to the one-man decisions of Soviet Directors, of the dictators elected or appointed by Soviet institutions, vested with dictatorial powers”. Outside the factories, in the Soviets, the need was the same. For Lenin, “The fight against the bureaucratic distortion of the Soviet form of organisation is assured by the firmness of the connection between the Soviets and the people, meaning by this the working and exploited people”.42
By the time Lenin wrote this there was hardly any connection left. The Soviets were hollow shells, administrative bodies drained of democratic life-blood. In 1920 Trotsky felt confident enough to reveal his real opinion of the Soviets. “The dictatorship of the Soviets became possible only by means of the dictatorship of the party”, he wrote.
It is thanks to the clarity of its theoretical vision and its strong revolutionary organisation that the party has afforded to the Soviets the possibility of becoming transformed from shapeless parliaments of labour into the apparatus of the supremacy of labour.43
The Soviets’ original form was now dismissed by the ultimate Bolshevik intellectual as undisciplined talking shops that required the orders of a one-party dictatorship to give them focus and direction. As a direct result of this policy, and not because of the terrible pressures of a civil war that had not yet begun, by June 1918 the Soviets were effectively dead.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Surveillance State
On 7th December, 1917, six weeks after the Bolshevik insurrection, Sovnarcom created the All–Russian Extraordinary Commission for the Struggle Against Counter–Revolution and Sabotage, popularly known by its Russian initials–Cheka. The Cheka was answerable only to the Council of People’s Commissars, not to the Soviet Executive. In his biography of Lenin, Tony Cliff emphasised how small the Cheka was to begin with and that the few death sentences it passed “were on common criminals” (he then barely mentioned it again except for a few pages on the civil war). In reality, by the end of 1917 the Cheka were releasing common criminals from Petrograd jails in order to make room for political prisoners.