In the face of this resistance, the Bolsheviks had recourse to force. On November 17, Menzhinskii reappeared at the State Bank: he found it deserted, save for some couriers and watchmen. Officers of the bank were brought in under armed guard. When they refused to hand over money, guards compelled them to open the vaults, from which Menzhinskii removed 5 million rubles. He carried it to Smolnyi in a velvet bag, which he triumphantly deposited on Lenin’s desk.59 The whole operation resembled a bank holdup.
The Bolsheviks now had access to Treasury funds, but strikes of bank personnel continued, despite arrests; nearly all banks remained closed. The State Bank, occupied by Bolshevik troops, was inoperative. It was to break the resistance of financial personnel that Lenin initially created, in December 1917, his security police, the Cheka.
A contemporary survey showed that in mid-December work was at a standstill at the ministries (now renamed commissariats) of Foreign Affairs, Enlightenment, Justice, and Supply, while the State Bank was in complete disarray.60 White-collar strikes also broke out in the provincial towns: in mid-November the municipal workers of Moscow struck; their colleagues in Petrograd followed suit on December 3. These work stoppages had one common purpose: modeled on the General Strike of October 1905, they were to force the government to renounce claims to autocracy. It was this powerful demonstration that persuaded Kamenev, Zinoviev, Rykov, and some other associates of Lenin that they had to share power with other socialist parties or the government could not function.
Lenin, however, held his ground and in mid-November ordered a counter-offensive. The Bolsheviks now physically occupied, one by one, every public institution in Petrograd and compelled their employees, under threat of severe punishment, to work for them. The following incident, reported by a contemporary newspaper, was repeated in many places:
On December 28 [OS], the Bolsheviks seized the Department of Customs. Directing the occupied Customs office is an official named Fadenev. On the eve of the Christmas holidays, following a general meeting of departmental employees, Fadenev had ordered everyone to return to work on December 28: those who failed to appear, he threatened, would lose their jobs and be liable to prosecution. On December 28, the department building was occupied by inspectors. The Bolsheviks allowed into the building only those employees who would sign a statement of full subordination to the “Council of People’s Commissars.”61
The directors of the Customs Department were subsequently dismissed and replaced with lower clerical staff. This pattern was repeated as the Bolsheviks conquered, in the literal sense of the word, the apparatus of the central government, often with the support of the junior staff whom they won over with promises of rapid promotion. They broke the strike of white collar employees only in January 1918, after they had dispersed the Constituent Assembly and ended all hope that they would voluntarily surrender or even share power.
During its initial three weeks, the Sovnarkom led a paper existence since it had neither a staff to execute its orders nor money to pay its own people. The Bolshevik commissars, barred from their offices, operated from Room 67 at Smolnyi, where Lenin had his headquarters. Lenin, ever fearful of attempts on his life, ordered that no one except People’s Commissars be allowed into his office: he rarely left Smolnyi, where he lived and officiated closely guarded by Latvians.* 62 As the Secretary of the Sovnarkom he picked the twenty-five-year-old N. P. Gorbunov. The new secretary, who had no administrative experience, confiscated a typewriter and a table and proceeded to peck out decrees with two fingers.63 V. Bonch-Bruevich, a devoted Bolshevik and a student of religious dissenters, was appointed Lenin’s private assistant. The two men hired clerical personnel. By the end of the year, the Sovnarkom had forty-eight clerical employees; in the next two months it acquired seventeen more. Judging by a group photograph taken in October 1918, a high proportion of these were clean-cut bourgeois young ladies.
73. Latvians guarding Lenin’s office in Smolnyi: 1917.
Prior to November 15, 1917, the Sovnarkom held no regular sessions: according to Gorbunov one meeting took place on November 3, but its only order of business was to hear a report by Nogin on the fighting in Moscow. During this period such decrees and ordnances as came out were the work of Bolshevik functionaries, who acted independently, often without consulting Lenin. According to Larin, only two of the first fifteen decrees issued by the Soviet Government were discussed in the Sovnarkom: the Decree on the Press, drafted by Lunarcharskii, and the Decree on Elections to the Constituent Assembly, prepared by himself. Gorbunov says Lenin authorized him to cable directives to the provinces on his own, showing him only every tenth telegram.64
The first regular meeting of the Sovnarkom took place on November 15, with an agenda of twenty items. It was agreed that the commissars would move out of Smolnyi as expeditiously as possible and take over their respective commissariats, which they did in the weeks that followed, with the help of armed detachments. From that day onward, the Sovnarkom met almost daily on the third floor of Smolnyi, usually in the evening: the meetings sometimes ran all night. Attendance was not much restricted, with many lower-level officials and non-Bolshevik technical experts brought in as the need arose. The commissars, lifelong revolutionaries, felt awkward. Simon Liberman, a Menshevik timber expert who occasionally attended Sovnarkom sessions, recalls the meetings as follows:
74. Lenin and secretarial staff of the Council of People’s Commissars: October 1918.
A peculiar atmosphere prevailed at the conferences of the highest administrative councils of Soviet Russia, presided over by Lenin. Despite all the efforts of an officious secretary to impart to each session the solemn character of a cabinet meeting, we could not help feeling that here we were, attending another sitting of an underground revolutionary committee! For years we had belonged to various underground organizations. All of this seemed so familiar. Many of the commissars remained seated in their topcoats or greatcoats; most of them wore the forbidding leather jackets. In wintertime some wore felt boots and thick sweaters. They remained thus clothed throughout the meetings.
One of the commissars, Alexander Tsuriupa, was nearly always ill; he attended these sessions in a semi-reclining position, his feet stretched out on a nearby chair. A number of Lenin’s aides would not take their seats at the conference table but shoved their chairs around helter-skelter all over the room. Lenin alone invariably took his seat at the table as the presiding officer of the occasion. He did so in a neat, almost decorous way. Fotieva, as his personal secretary, sat beside him.65
Lenin, irritated by the unpunctuality and verbosity of his colleagues, worked out strict rules. To prevent chatter, he insisted on strict adherence to the agenda.* To ensure that his commissars showed up on time, he set fines for lateness: five rubles for less than half an hour, ten for more.66
75. One of the early meetings of the Council of People’s Commissars. Lenin in the center. Behind him, hand at mouth, Stalin.
According to Liberman, the meetings of the Sovnarkom which he attended never decided on policy but dealt only with implementation:
I never heard arguments over matters of principle; the discussion always revolved around the problem of finding the best possible methods of carrying out a given measure. Matters of principle were decided elsewhere—in the Political Bureau of the Communist Party.… The two highest organs of the Government which I knew—the Council of People’s Commissars and the Council of Labor and Defense—discussed practical ways to effect measures already decided upon by the inner sanctum of the party—its Political Bureau.†