Even so, the decrees to assert control by government and by people were unable to restore the economy. The increased state ownership and regulation were, if anything, counter-productive to the restoration of the economy. The Bolshevik party was menaced by a gathering emergency of production, transportation and distribution which the Provisional Government had failed to resolve. Lenin had blamed all problems on ministerial incompetence and bourgeois greed and corruption. His own attempt to reconstruct the economy was proving to be even more ineffectual.
Within a couple of years the party’s opponents were to claim that Sovnarkom could have rectified the situation by boosting investment in consumer-oriented industrial output and by dismantling the state grain-trade monopoly. Yet they were not saying this in 1917–18.At the time there was a recognition that the difficulties were largely beyond the capacity of any government to resolve. All of them were adamantly committed to the prosecution of the war against the Central Powers. The necessity to arm, clothe and feed the armed forces was therefore paramount. A free market in grain would have wrecked the war effort. The Bolsheviks alone were willing, just about willing, to sign a separate peace with the Germans and Austrians. But they set their face determinedly against economic privatization. What the liberal administration of Prince Lvov had nationalized they were not going to restore to the conditions of an unregulated market.
For they were a far-left political party, and proud of their ideas and traditions: they renamed themselves as the ‘Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks)’ expressly in order to demarcate themselves from other types of socialism.39 Ideological impatience infused their thinking. Lenin was more cautious than most Bolsheviks on industrial and agrarian policies, and yet he never seriously contemplated de-nationalization. If he had done, he would not have got far with his party. Victory in the Brest-Litovsk controversy had already stretched the party to breaking-point. Any further compromise with Bolshevik revolutionary principles would have caused an unmendable split. As it was, the Treaty threatened its own disaster. A country which already could not properly feed and arm itself had lost crucial regions of population and production. Could the October Revolution survive?
5
New World, Old World
Bolshevik leaders had assumed that people who supported them in 1917 would never turn against them and that the party’s popularity would trace an unwavering, upward line on the graph. In the Central Committee before the October Revolution, only Kamenev and Zinoviev had dissented from this naïve futurology — and their scepticism had incurred Lenin’s wrath. Certainly there were excuses for misjudging the potential backing for the party. The Bolsheviks had not yet got their message through to millions of fellow citizens, and it was not unreasonable for them to expect to reinforce their influence once their reforms and their propaganda had had their desired effect. Lenin and his associates could also point out that the Constituent Assembly results had underplayed the popularity of the Sovnarkom coalition because the candidate lists did not differentiate between the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Socialist-Revolutionaries.
Nor had it been senseless to anticipate socialist revolution in central and western Europe. Bread riots had led to upheaval in Russia in February 1917. There were already reports of urban discontent in Germany and Austria and disturbances had taken place in the Kiel naval garrison. The Bolsheviks were right to suspect that the governments of both the Central Powers and the Allies were censoring newspapers so as to hide the growth of anti-war sentiment.
When all due allowance is made, however, the Bolsheviks had not acquired a governmental mandate from the Constituent Assembly elections; and their popularity, which had been rising in the last months of 1917, declined drastically in 1918. It was also clear that most persons in the former Russian Empire who voted for the party had objectives very different from those of Lenin and Trotski. The Constituent Assembly polls had given eighty-five per cent of the vote to socialists of one kind or another.1 But the Bolsheviks were a single socialist party whereas the working class wanted a coalition government of all socialist parties and not just the Bolsheviks or an alliance restricted to Bolsheviks and Left Socialist-Revolutionaries. Workers in general did not demand dictatorship, terror, censorship or the violent dispersal of the Constituent Assembly. Nor did most of the soldiers and peasants who sided with the Bolshevik party know about the intention to involve them in a ‘revolutionary war’ if revolutions failed to occur elsewhere.2
This discrepancy was not accidental. The public agenda of Bolshevism had not been characterized by frankness; and sympathizers with the Bolshevik party, including most rank-and-file party members, had little idea of the basic assumptions and principles of the Central Committee. Yet this was not the whole story. For the Central Committee, while fooling its party and its electoral supporters, also deluded itself that the October Revolution would be crowned with easily-won success. They believed that their contingency plan for revolutionary war was unlikely to need to be implemented. When they replaced ‘land nationalization’ as a policy with ‘land socialization’, they felt that the peasantry would eventually see that nationalization was in its basic interest.3
Also of importance was the need for the Bolshevik leaders to simplify their policies to render them comprehensible to their own party and to society. Open politics had been hobbled in the tsarist period, and the public issues most readily understood by ordinary men and women after the February Revolution were those which were of direct significance for their families, factories and localities. Whereas they immediately perceived the implications of the crises in Russian high politics over Milyukov’s telegram in April and the Kornilov mutiny in August, their grasp of the less sensational issues of war, politics and economics was less sure. Consequently it was vital for the Bolsheviks to concentrate on uncomplicated slogans and posters that would attract people to their party’s side.4 This was a difficult task; for the universal political euphoria at the downfall of the Romanov dynasty gave way to widespread apathy amidst the working class about the soviets and other mass organizations in subsequent months.
A further problem was that the Bolsheviks were not agreed among themselves. There had been a serious split in the Central Committee over the composition of the government in November 1917, and another in March 1918 over the question of war and peace. At a time when the party’s need was to indoctrinate society, it had yet to determine its own policies. Even Lenin was probing his way. Society, the Russian Communist Party and its central leaders were finding out about each other and about themselves.
The party’s difficulties were especially severe in the borderlands, where Lenin’s regime was regarded as illegitimate. Practically the entire vote for the Bolsheviks in the Constituent Assembly had come from Russian cities or from industrial cities outside Russia that had a large working class embracing a goodly proportion of ethnic Russians. Only in the Latvian and Estonian areas, where hatred of the Germans was greater than worry about Russians, did the Bolsheviks have success with a non-Russian electorate.5 In the Transcaucasus, the Mensheviks of Georgia got together with Armenian and Azeri politicians to form a Transcaucasian Commissariat. A Sejm, or parliament, was set up in February 1918. But already there were divisions, especially between the Armenians and Azeris; and an alliance between the Bolsheviks and Armenian nationalists in Baku led to a massacre of the Muslim Azeris. The Ottoman army intervened on the Azeri side in spring.6 By May 1918 three independent states had been set up: Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia. The communists had been ousted even from Baku, and the entire Transcaucasus was lost to them.