The peasants were ordered … as a sort of labor service expected of them by the Government … to cut down so many cords of wood in designated forests. Every horse-owning peasant had to transport a certain quantity of wood. All this wood had to be delivered by the peasant to river jetties, cities, and other terminal points.135
The principal difference between compulsory labor, or tiaglo, in Muscovite Russia and that in Communist Russia was that in the Middle Ages it had been a sporadic duty, imposed to meet specific needs, whereas now it became a permanent obligation.
In the winter of 1919–20, Trotsky conceived an ambitious scheme of “militarizing labor” in which soldiers in uniform would perform productive economic work while civilian workers would be subjected to military discipline. This throwback to the infamous “military colonies” instituted a century earlier by Alexander I and Arakcheev met with skepticism and hostility. But Trotsky persisted and would not be dissuaded. Back from his triumph in the Civil War, full of his own importance and eager to gain fresh laurels, he insisted that Russia’s economic problems could be resolved only by the same rough-and-ready methods which the Red Army had used to defeat the external enemy. On December 16, 1919, he drafted a set of “Theses” for the Central Committee.136 He argued that economic problems had to be stormed with blindly disciplined armies of workers. Russia’s labor force was to be regimented in military fashion: the shirking of duty (refusal to take on assigned work, absenteeism, drinking on the job, etc.) was to be treated as a crime and the culprits turned over to courts-martial. Trotsky further proposed that Red Army units no longer needed for combat duty, instead of being demobilized and sent home, be transformed into “Labor Armies” (Trudarmii). These “Theses” were not intended for publication, but Bukharin, the editor of Pravda, printed them anyway, either inadvertently (as he claimed) or to discredit Trotsky (as others believed). Published in Pravda on January 22, 1920, they unleashed a storm of protests, in which the epithet “Arakcheevsh-china” was commonly heard.
Lenin was won over because of the desperate need to halt the further deterioration of the country’s economy. On December 27, 1919, he agreed to the creation of a Commission on Labor Obligation, with Trotsky, who retained the post of Commissar of War, as president. Trotsky’s program entailed two sets of measures:
1. Military units no longer required at the front would not be demobilized but would be transformed into peacetime Labor Armies and assigned to such tasks as repairing railroad beds, transporting fuel, and fixing agricultural machinery. The Third Army Corps, which had fought in the Urals, was the first to undergo this transformation. Later other units were converted. In March 1921, one-quarter of the Red Army was employed in construction and transport.
2. Concurrently, all workers and peasants were made subject to military discipline. At the Ninth Party Congress in 1920, where this policy provoked intense controversy, Trotsky insisted that the government had to be free to use civilian labor wherever it was needed, without regard to the personal preferences of the workers, exactly as in the armed forces. “Mobilized” labor was to be assigned to enterprises requesting it through the Commissariat of Labor. In 1922, looking back at this experiment, an official of this commissariat stated: “We supplied labor according to plan and, consequently, without taking into account the individual peculiarities or wishes of the worker to engage in this or that kind of work.”137
Neither the Labor Armies nor militarized labor fulfilled the expectations of their protagonists. Soldier workers produced only a fraction of the output of trained civilians; they also deserted in droves. The government faced insurmountable technical difficulties in attempting to administer, feed, and transport the militarized labor force. Hence, this prototype of Stalin’s and Hitler’s slave-labor organizations had to be abandoned: industrial mobilization was abolished on October 12, 1921, and the Labor Armies one month later.138
The experiment discredited Trotsky and weakened him in the struggle for the succession to Lenin not only because it had failed but because it made him vulnerable to charges of “Bonapartism.” For indeed, if Russia’s economy had been militarized, officers subordinate to him would have acquired a dominant role in the civilian sector. “Trotskyism” as a term of abuse gained currency in 1920 in connection with this scheme.139
In a regime based on compulsory labor there was, of course, no place for free trade unions. There were logical reasons why such unions could not be allowed, since in a “worker” state the workers by definition could not have interests separate from those of their employer. As Trotsky once put it, the Russian worker was “obligated to the Soviet state, under its orders in every direction, for it is his state”140—in obeying it, therefore, he was obeying himself, even if he happened to think otherwise. There were also practical reasons why independent trade unions could not be tolerated, inasmuch as they were incompatible with central planning. Hence, the Bolsheviks lost no time in depriving of independence the two main organizations of Russian labor—Factory Committees and trade unions.
It will be recalled that after the outbreak of the February Revolution, with Bolshevik encouragement, Factory Committees spread and gained influence in Russia as organs of workers’ control. In conditions of spreading anarchy, they expanded at the expense of the trade unions, organized nationally by crafts, because the workers found more in common with others employed in the same plant than with fellow workers possessing the same skills but employed elsewhere. Inspired by syndicalist ideas, the Factory Committees gravitated leftward and in the fall of 1917 provided one of the main sources of Bolshevik strength.
But once in power, the Bolsheviks found little use for these committees. Pursuing their private interests and tending to treat industrial establishments as property, they interfered with production and obstructed economic planning. In the weeks that followed the October coup, while they were still insecurely in power, the Bolsheviks continued to curry favor with them. A decree of November 27, 1917, provided for the establishment of Workers’ Committees in all enterprises employing five or more workers. They were to supervise production, determine the minimum output, set production costs, and enjoy access to the accounting books.141 This was syndicalism, pure and simple. But Lenin no more intended workers to run Russia’s industries than peasants to own Russia’s agricultural land, soldiers to run their regiments, or national minorities to secede. All these were means to an end, the end being the conquest of power. Hence, he inserted into the decree on Factory Committees two provisions, little noted at the time, which gave the government the right to abrogate it. One stated that while the decisions of the workers or their representatives were binding on the owners of enterprises, they were subject to annulment by “trade unions and [their] congresses.” Another clause stipulated that in enterprises designated as being of “state importance”—that is, either working for defense or producing articles “necessary for the existence” of the masses—the Workers’ Committees were accountable to the state “for the maintenance of the strictest order and discipline.” As one historian observes, these vague provisions soon rendered the decree on workers’ control “not to be worth the paper it was written on.”142
In time, the Factory Committees were emasculated by being subjected to bureaucratic oversight. The decree on workers’ control required each committee to render accounts to the Regional Council of Workers’ Control; these Regional Councils, in turn, were subordinated to the All-Russian Council of Workers’ Control. Officials running these supervisory organs received their appointments from the Communist Party and were duty-bound to carry out its instructions.143 These institutions prevented Factory Committees from forming their own national organization independent of the state. The decree establishing the Supreme Economic Council (December 1917) gave it authority over all existing economic bodies, including the All-Russian Council of Workers’ Control.