In sum, forced labor was not only indispensable to socialism but actually beneficiaclass="underline" “Forced serf labor did not emerge because of the ill will of the feudal class: it was a progressive phenomenon.”123
The notion that the worker must become a peon of the “socialist” state—that is, on the face of it, a slave of himself, since he was said to be “master” of that state—embedded in the Marxist theory of a centralized, organized economy and its misanthropic view of human nature, was further strengthened by the extremely low opinion which the Bolshevik leaders had of Russia’s workers. Before the Revolution, they had idealized them, but contact with the worker in the flesh quickly put an end to illusions. While Trotsky extolled the virtues of serfdom, Lenin dismissed the Russian “proletariat.” At the Eleventh Party Congress, in March 1922, he said:
Very often, when they say “workers” it is thought that this means the factory proletariat. But it means nothing of the kind. In our country, since the war, the people who went to work in factories and plants were not proletarian at all, but those who did so to hide from the war. And do we now have social and economic conditions which induce true proletarians to go to work in factories and plants? This is not the case. It is correct according to Marx, but Marx wrote not about Russia but about capitalism as a whole, beginning with the fifteenth century. For six hundred years this was correct, and for today’s Russia it is not correct. Those who go into the factories are through and through not proletarians but all kinds of casual elements.124
The implications of this astonishing admission were not lost on some Bolsheviks: for Lenin was saying nothing less than that the October Revolution had not been made by or even for the “proletarians.” Shliapnikov alone had the courage to point this out: “Vladimir Ilich said yesterday that the proletariat in the sense in which Marx perceived it does not exist.… Allow me to congratulate you on being the vanguard of a nonexistent class.”125
With such a view of human nature in general and Russian labor in particular as Lenin and Trotsky entertained, they could hardly have tolerated free labor and independent trade unions even if other considerations had not spoken against them.
The official reasons for the introduction of compulsory labor were the requirements of economic planning: economic planning, it was argued, not inconsistently, could not be realized unless labor were subject to the same controls as all the other economic resources. The Bolsheviks spoke of the need for compulsory labor obligation as early as April 1917, before coming to power.126 Lenin apparently saw no contradiction in saying that whereas the introduction of compulsory labor in capitalist Germany in wartime “inevitably meant military penal servitude [katorga] for the workers,” under Soviet rule the same phenomenon represented “a giant step toward socialism.”127
True to their word, the Bolsheviks declared the intention of introducing labor conscription on their first day in office. On October 25, 1917, almost in the same breath in which he announced the deposition of the Provisional Government, Trotsky told the Second Congress of Soviets: “The introduction of the universal labor obligation is one of the most immediate objectives of a genuine revolutionary government.”128 Probably most of the delegates thought this statement applied only to the “bourgeoisie.” And, indeed, in the first months of his dictatorship, Lenin, driven by personal animosity, went out of his way to humiliate the “bourgeoisie,” compelling people unaccustomed to manual labor to perform menial chores. In the draft of the decree nationalizing banks (December 1917), he wrote:
Article 6: universal labor obligation. The first step—consumer-labor, budget-labor booklets for the rich, control over them. Their duty: to work as ordered, else—“enemies of the people.”
And in the margin he added: “Dispatch to the front, compulsory labor, confiscation, arrests (execution by shooting).”129 Later it was a common sight in Moscow and Petrograd to see well-dressed people performing menial duties under guard. The benefit of this forced labor was probably close to nil, but it was intended to serve “educational” purposes—namely, to incite class hatred.
As Lenin had indicated, this was only the first step. Before long, the principle of compulsory labor was extended to other social strata: it meant not only that every adult had to be productively employed but that he or she had to work where ordered. This obligation, which returned Russia to the practices of the seventeenth century, was decreed in January 1918 in the “Declaration of the Rights of the Toiling and Exploited Masses,” which contained the following clause: “For the purpose of destroying the parasitic elements of the population and for the organization of the economy, there is introduced the universal labor obligation.”130 Inserted into the 1918 Constitution, this principle became the law of the land and has served ever since as the legal basis for treating anyone shirking state employment as a “parasite.”
The principle of labor conscription was worked out in practical detail at the end of 1918. A decree of October 29, 1918, established a nationwide network of agencies to “distribute the labor force.”131 On December 10, 1918, Moscow issued a detailed “Labor Code” which provided for all male and female citizens between the ages of sixteen and fifty, with some exceptions, to render “labor service.” Those who already held regular jobs were to stay at them. The others were to register with Departments for the Allocation of the Labor Force (Otdely Raspredeleniia Rabochei Sily, or ORRS). These organs had the authority to assign them to any work anywhere they saw fit.
Not only did the decrees on compulsory labor apply to minors (children sixteen to eighteen) but special ordinances permitted children employed in war industries or other enterprises of special importance to the state to be made to work overtime.132
By late 1918, it became common practice for the Bolshevik authorities to call up workers and specialists in various fields for state service exactly as they drafted recruits into the Red Army. The practice was for the government to announce that workers and technical specialists in a specified branch of the economy were “mobilized for military service” and subject to court-martiaclass="underline" those leaving jobs to which they had been assigned were treated as deserters. Persons with skills in critical fields, but not currently employed in jobs where they could use them, had to register and await a call-up. The first civilians to be “mobilized” were railroad workers (November 28, 1918). Other categories followed: persons with technical education and experience (December 19, 1918), medical personnel (December 20, 1918), employees of the river and ocean fleets (March 15, 1919), coal miners (April 7, 1919), postal, telephone, and telegraph employees (May 5, 1919), workers in the fuel industry (June 27, 1919, and November 8, 1919), wool industry workers (August 13, 1920), metalworkers (August 20, 1920), and electricians (October 8, 1920).133 In this manner, industrial occupations became progressively “militarized” and the difference between soldiers and workers, military and civilian sectors, was blurred. Efforts to organize industrial labor on the military model could not have worked well in view of the plethora of decrees on this subject, setting up ever new punishments for “labor deserters,” ranging from the publication of their names to confinement in concentration camps.134
Whatever its formal economic justification, the practice of forced labor meant a reversion to the Muscovite institution of tiaglo, by virtue of which all adult male and female peasants and other commoners could be called upon to perform chores on behalf of the state. Then, as now, its main forms were carting goods, cutting lumber, and construction work. The description of the duty imposed on peasants in 1920 to furnish fuel would have been quite comprehensible to Muscovite Russians: