The Council of Workers’ Plenipotentiaries sat in almost daily session. On June 26, it voted unanimously to call for a one-day political strike on July 2, under the slogans “Down with the Death Penalty,” “Down with Executions and the Civil War,” “Long Live the Freedom to Strike.”161 SR and Menshevik intellectuals again came out against the strike.162
The Bolshevik authorities posted placards all over the city which described the organizers of the strike as hirelings of White Guardists and threatened to turn all strikers over to Revolutionary Tribunals.163 For good measure they set up machine gun posts at key points in the city.
Sympathetic reporters described the workers as vacillating: the Kadet Nash vek wrote on June 22 that they were anti-Soviet but confused. The difficult domestic and international situation, food shortages, and the absence of clear solutions induced in them “an extreme imbalance, a depression of sorts, and even perplexity.”
The events of July 2 confirmed this assessment. The first political strike in Russia since the fall of tsarism sputtered and went out. The workers, discouraged by socialist intellectuals, intimidated by the Bolshevik show of force, uncertain of their strength and purpose, lost heart. The organizers estimated that between 18,000 and 20,000 workers obeyed the call to strike, which was no more than one-seventh of Petrograd’s actual labor force. Obkuhov, Maxwell, and Pahl struck, but most of the other plants, Putilov included, did not.
This result sealed the fate of independent workers’ organizations in Russia. Before long, the Cheka closed down the Council of Workers’ Plenipotentiaries in Petrograd along with its provincial branches, sending the most outspoken leaders to prison.
Thus ended the autonomy of the soviets, the right of workers to their own representation, and what was still left of the multiparty system. These measures, enacted in June and early July 1918, completed the formation in Russia of a one-party dictatorship.
*This device was surprisingly successful with foreigners. In the 1920s Communist Russia was widely perceived by foreign socialists and liberals as a democratic government of a new, “soviet” type. Early visitors’ accounts rarely mentioned the Communist Party and its dominant role, so effectively was it concealed.
†Hitler, who fashioned the Nationalist-Socialist Party closely on the Bolshevik and Fascist models, told Hermann Rauschning that the term “party” was really a misnomer for his organization. He preferred it to be called “an order”: Rauschning, Hitler Speaks (London, 1939), 198, 243.
*B. Eltsin in VS, No. 6/7 (May 1919), 9–10. The author claims that these institutions, created on orders of the Central Committee and the government, initiated the process of the “gathering of the Russian lands,” a term traditionally applied to early modern Moscow.
*These tendencies were exacerbated by the government’s refusal to fund provincial soviets. In February 1918, Petrograd responded to the requests from provincial soviets for money by telling them that they should obtain it by “mercilessly” taxing the propertied classes: PR, No. 3/38 (1925), 161–62. This order led local authorities to levy arbitrary “contributions” on the “bourgeoisie” in their area.
*W. Pietsch, Revolution und Staat (Köln, 1969), 63. The old CEC, disbanded by the Bolsheviks, continued to meet, sometimes in the open, sometimes clandestinely, until the end of December 1917: Revoliutsiia, III, 90–91.
*The Left SRs on this occasion voted against him: Revoliutsiia, VI, 99.
†Dekrety, I, 24–25. Lunacharskii is credited with its authorship by Iurii Larin in NKh, No. 11 (1918), 16–17.
*Dekrety, I, 29–30. The date when the decree was issued cannot be established: it appeared in the Bolshevik press on October 31 and November 1, 1917.
*A. L. Fraiman, Forpost sotsialisticheskoi revoliutsii (Leningrad, 1969), 169–70. The Bolsheviks took the precaution of increasing their representation on the CEC with five reliable members (Revoliutsiia, VI, 72).
*In December 1919, the few powers still nominally vested in the CEC were transferred to its chairman, who thereby became “head of state.” CEC meetings, which originally had been intended to be continuous, took place ever less frequently: in 1921, the CEC met only three times. See E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, I (New York, 1951), 220–30.
†“kak pravitel’stvo”: L. Trotskii, O Lenine (Moscow, 1924), 102. The English translator distorted this passage to read that Lenin “acted as a government should”: L. Trotsky, Lenin (New York, 1971), 121.
‡As we shall note below, there were exceptions to this rule.
*According to Professor John Keep, in the first eighteen weeks in power—that is, until early March 1918 when he moved to Moscow—Lenin left Smolnyi only twenty-one times-. Report presented at the Conference on the Russian Revolution, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, January 1988.
*BK, No. 1 (1934), 107. Jay Lovestone, a founder of the American Communist Party, told the author that once, when speaking with Lenin, he used three-by-five cards. Lenin wanted to know their purpose. When Lovestone explained that, to save Lenin’s time, he had written down on them what he intended to say, Lenin said that Communism would come to Russia when she too learned to use three-by-five cards.
†S. Liberman, Building Lenin’s Russia (Chicago, 1945), 13. The minutes of the Sovnarkom, which, next to the protocols of the Bolshevik Central Committee, constitute the most important source on early Bolshevik policies, are preserved at the Central Party Archive (TsPA) of the Marx-Lenin Institute in Moscow, under the shelf mark “Fond 19.” They are made available only to the most trusted Communist historians. Others must rely on secondhand references, such as those contained (in very incomplete form) in the biographical chronicle of Lenin’s life: Institut Marksizma-Leninizma pri TsK KPSS, Vladimir Il’ich Lenin: Biograficheskaia Khronika, 1870–1924, V-XII (Moscow, 1974–82). See further E. B. Genkina, Protokoly Sovnarkoma RSFSR (Moscow, 1982).
*DN, No. 222 (December 2, 1917), 3. The protocols of this congress have not been published: the fullest description of the proceedings, on which the following account is based, appeared in the SR daily, Delo naroda, November 20-December 13, 1917.
†DN, No. 223 (December 3/16, 1917), 3. The Communist chronicle of the Revolution (Revoliutsiia, VI, 258) distorts the sense of this resolution when it claims that the SRs demanded that power be taken away from the soviets and turned over to the Constituent Assembly. The SRs, in fact, wanted the Assembly and the soviets to cooperate.
* Vtoroi S’ezd RSDSRP: Protokoly (Moscow, 1959), 181–82. Trotsky in 1903 said something similar: “All democratic principles must be subordinated exclusively to the interests of the party.” (M. Vishniak, Bolshevism and Democracy, New York, 1914, 67.)