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.