The fate of the Russian labor movement, in its anarcho-syndicalist as well as trade union form, was largely settled at the First Congress of Trade Unions, held in Petrograd in January 1918.144 Here, socialist intellectuals, Bolsheviks and Mensheviks alike, criticized the anarcho-syndicalist tendencies of industrial workers and rejected demands for workers’ control as detrimental to productivity and inimical to socialism. Despite heated arguments in favor of workers’ control, the congress, dominated by Bolsheviks, who on this issue had the backing of the Mensheviks and SRs, adopted a resolution shifting the means of exercising workers’ control over production from Factory Committees to the trade unions. Factory Committees now lost many of the powers granted them in November, including that of interfering with financial matters. “Control over production,” the resolution stated, “does not mean the transfer of the enterprise into the hands of workers.”
When the congress turned its attention to trade unions, the Mensheviks parted ways with the Bolsheviks. Since they enjoyed strong support among some of the largest national unions, the Mensheviks favored independent trade unionism. The Bolsheviks maintained that trade unions should serve as instruments of the state, its agents in “organizing production” and “rehabilitating the country’s shattered economic forces.” Among their tasks was “enforcing the universal obligation to work.” “The congress is convinced,” the Bolshevik resolution read, “that trade unions will inevitably become transformed into organs of the socialist state”:
The entire process of the full fusion of the trade unions with the organs of state authority (the so-called process of ogosudarstvlenie) must occur as the completely inevitable result of their joint, closest, and harmonized activity and the training by trade unions of the broad worker masses for the task of administering the state apparatus and all the organs in charge of the economy.145
This was very much in line with a tradition of Russian history by virtue of which the state, sooner or later, coopted and subordinated to itself all institutions originally formed, sometimes on its own initiative, as independent, self-governing bodies.
Once it had been decreed that individual Factory Committees were subject to the All-Russian Council of Workers’ Control, that this council, in turn, had to account to the trade unions and their congresses, and that the proper function of trade unions was to serve as “organs of the socialist state,” the fate of Factory Committees was sealed. The history of workers’ control institutions following the First Congress of Trade Unions is one of relentless decline: they shrank, wilted, and died, one by one. The abortive movement in the spring of 1918 to create a nationwide network of workers’ plenipotentiaries was the last gasp of the movement. By 1919, they were only a memory.
As concerns trade unions, they increased their scope if not their authority as the Civil War neared its climax and the government came to rely on them to enforce labor discipline. The party increasingly assumed the right to appoint trade union officials, removing elected officials of whom it did not approve.146 In 1919 and 1920, state and party resolutions still paid lip service to the principle that trade unions helped run the nation’s economy. But in reality by then their main task was to serve as transmitters of government directives. This is how Trotsky defined the role of trade unions in April 1920:
In the socialist state under construction, trade unions are needed not to struggle for better working conditions—this is the task of the social and political organization as a whole—but to organize the working class for the purpose of production: to educate, discipline, allocate, collect, attach individual categories and individual workers to their jobs for a set period: in a word, hand in hand with the government in an authoritative manner to bring workers into the framework of a single economic plan.147
The trade unions proved a harder nut to crack than the ephemeral Factory Committees: after the Civil War, in 1920–21, an explosion would occur in Bolshevik ranks over the practice of replacing elected union officials with appointed party bureaucrats. This issue would cause a great deal of internal friction and give Lenin the pretext for outlawing the formation of factions in the Communist Party.
Once it had been established that the function of trade unions was not to defend the interests of their members, but to serve the state, it was logical for membership in them to be made mandatory. Compulsory enrollment was not decreed but introduced gradually in one trade after another, until, at the end of 1918, three-quarters of the working force was subject to compulsory unionization.148 The larger their membership, the more impotent the trade unions became.
The right to strike was considered fundamental to labor’s interests and was reconfirmed as such at the trade unions’ Third All-Russian Conference in June 1917.149 The Communist Government neither then nor later issued a decree outlawing strikes: it was obvious, nevertheless, that the Bolsheviks would not tolerate work stoppages against state enterprises. They were inhibited from outlawing strikes by legislative fiat as long as the overwhelming majority of industrial enterprises were in private hands, but they were not prepared to confirm this right. At the Congress of Trade Unions in January 1918, the trade unionist G. Tsyperovich moved that the “professional worker movement continues, as before, to regard the strike as a means of defending its interests” with the understanding that under “the new conditions of workers’ control of production, [strikes] can be more soundly implemented.” The congress, dominated by Bolsheviks, ignored this resolution.150 In practice, strikes were permitted against privately owned enterprises, as long as these existed, but not in state enterprises. The progressive nationalization of industry had the effect of making strikes unlawful. The implications of the de facto abolition of the right to strike in Soviet Russia are thus defined by one scholar:
The first assumption [of the Soviet Government] was that collective bargaining and the strength of the unions did not rest on the right to call a work stoppage, but on its political relationship with the state and Party. In all cases, the burden of responsibility for avoiding and terminating strikes was now transferred to the trade unions, the very institutions for which the right to strike was vital. The trade unions were left in the impossible position of having to deny the one power that would give them strength and enable them to protect their membership.151
This spelled the death of trade unionism in Soviet Russia.
The policies subsequently christened War Communism were meant to raise economic performance to a peak never known: it was the most ambitious attempt ever made until then to rationalize completely production and distribution through the elimination of market forces. Did it produce the desired results? Clearly not. Even the most fanatical advocates of these policies had to admit that after three years of experimentation the Soviet economy lay in shambles. As rapidly as the regime nationalized everything in sight, the illicit free market expanded, threatening to absorb what remained of Russia’s wealth. And there was not that much left to absorb. Russia’s Gross National Income in 1920 fluctuated between 33 and 40 percent of what it had been in 1913. The living standard of workers by then had declined to one-third of its prewar level.152