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.