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The Commune State in Moscow in 1918

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Richard Sakwa
Richard Sakwa*
Affiliation:
University of Kent
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Extract

The first months of Soviet power raise important questions about the ideology of the transition to socialism and about the nature of Bolshevik power. The destruction of the old state apparatus was accompanied by vigorous institution building; the “red guard attack against capital” was balanced by the emergence of potentially powerful Soviet economic apparatus. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk signed in March 1918 was followed by a period of state capitalism in which a strong socialist state was to supervise elements of capitalism in the economy. All stages were accompanied by vigorous debate within the party and, from March 1918, by the political alienation of a section of the working class. By the onset of full-scale civil war and the transition to war communism in late spring 1918 the Bolshevik party and the institutions of the new Soviet state dominated the political life of the country. Was there something in Marxist ideology that, when interpreted by Lenin and the Bolsheviks, encouraged centralized and dirigiste forms of government regardless of actual conditions? A large body of literature now exists that examines this issue from various perspectives. This literature has recently been enriched by a number of studies that look at events from the perspective of lower-level participants and area case studies.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 46 , Issue 3-4 , Fall/Winter 1987 , pp. 429 - 449
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1987

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References

An earlier version of this paper was presented to the Essex Conference on the Early Months of Bolshevik Rule (University of Essex, May 1984). I would like to thank Steve Smith and Howard White for their helpful comments.

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In this article all dates up to and including 31 January 1918 are according to the Old Stylecalendar. Following a jump of thirteen days all dates from 14 February are New Style.

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18. Pravda, 6 April 1918. In 1917 there were 84, 347 workers in the textile industry and 49, 209 inthe metal industry (Statisticheskii ezhegodnik, p. 198), whereas in August 1918 there were 40, 373 and 23, 285, Krasnaia Moskva: sbornik statei no. 31 (Moscow, 1920), col. 177.

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25. The organization of power in Moscow was discussed at the 4 November 1917 joint meetingof the Moscow party committee, the Moscow Oblast Bureau, the guberniia committee, and the Bolshevik faction of the Moscow Workers’ Soviet. I. A. Piatnitskii, secretary of the first of these groups, proposed “the formation of a democratic government composed of all the socialist parties.” Although it gained support, the proposal was rejected and a resolution passed in support of the party Central Committee's line of all power to the Soviets. Nevertheless, it was still conceded that power could include representatives of some nonsoviet organizations, such as the socialist part of the zemstvo organizations and municipal government; Triumfal'noe shestvie sovetskoi vlasti: dokumenty i materialy, part I (Moscow, 1963), pp. 327, 337.

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31. The presidium was in almost continuous session, meeting 123 times between November 1917and March 1918 (Krasnaia Moskva, col 32), and thirty times in the last two weeks of November 1917 (Aleshchenko, Osushchestvlenie Leninskikh ukazanii, p. 27).

32. Krasnaia Moskva, col. 34.

33. Marc Ferro argues that the process had already begun in 1917; see “The Birth of the Soviet Bureaucratic System” in Reconsiderations on the Russian Revolutions, ed. R. Carter Elwood (Cambridge, Mass.: Slavica, 1976), pp. 113–120. Compare Roi Medvedev, On Socialist Democracy (London: Spokesman, 1975), 140–141.

34. Raleigh, Revolution on the Volga, p. 319, stresses the importance of the Left Socialist Revolutionariesjoining Lenin's government (together with the effect of “skin deep” Bolshevized soldiersreturning from the front) in consolidating the new political regime in the provinces.

35. Moskovskii sovel za desiat’ let raboty (Moscow, 1927), pp. 78–79; Krasnaia Moskva, cols.39–48; Brovkin, Vladimir, “The Mensheviks’ Political Comeback: The Elections to the Provincial CitySoviets in Spring 1918,” Russian Review 42 (1983): 1–50 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Savel'ev, Vpervyi, p. 110.

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38. Ibid., p. 67.

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41. Kommunisticheskii trud, 5 May 1920. Some of the numerical increase was perhaps due to theinclusion of categories, such as teachers and nurses, previously not counted as local administrative workers, but the upward trend at a time of falling population is clear.

42. Chugaev, D. A., ed., Rabochii klass Sovetskoi Rossti vpervyi goddiktatury proletariate!: sbornik dokumentov i materialov (Mosow, 1965)Google Scholar, doc. no. 52.

43. Kommunar, 18 October 1918.

44. A survey of the 460 employees of Moscow Oblast Council of the Economy found that out of 383 technical personnel, 180 had previously worked for bourgeois economic bodies. Only 7 (1.8 percent) were Communists, and of the whole 460 only 25 (5.4 percent) were Communists. All 77 ofthe council's leading workers had earlier worked in various soviet organizations and in the workers’ groups of bourgeois organs, and 18 (23.4 percent) of them were party members; Drobizhev, V. Z., “Obrazovanie sovetov narodnogo khoziaistva v Moskovskom promyshlennom raione (1917–1918gg.),” in Iz istorii velikoi oktiabr'skoi sotsialisticheskoi revoliutsii (Moscow, 1957), pp. 107–108 Google Scholar.

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49. Uprochenie sovetskoi vlasti v Moskve i Moskovskoi gubernii: dokumenty i materialy (Moscow, 1958), p. 168. The short-lived soviet of workers’ control of the Central Industrial Region, formedtoward the end of 1917, was considered subordinate to the Moscow Soviet, Al'perovich, E. M., “Otrabochego kontrolia k pervym shagam promyshlennogo stroitel'stva,” in Ocherki po istorii oktiabr'skoi revoliutsii v Moskve (Moscow, 1927), p. 148 Google Scholar.

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55. For example, the resolution of 2 June 1918 Moscow oblast textile union factory committeeconference, in Vprochenie, p. 261. As for economic policy, “there were some constants, like centralization of economic decisions, collective commodity exchange, and the ability to make use of financial means of control, which preceded the major involvement in war and prepared the way for some later economic developments,” Malle, Silvana, The Economic Organisation of War Communism 1918–1921 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, p. 14 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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59. Kommunist 1 (20 April 1918): 9; compare p. 16 and no. 2 (27 April 1918): 9.

60. Charles E. Ziegler, “Worker Participation and Worker Discontent in the Soviet Union,” Political Science Quarterly (Summer 1983), p. 247.

61. These are the figures for 46 out of 54 unions in the Moscow Trade Union Council. Of the other 101 members, 70 were Bolsheviks, 9 in other parties, and 22 nonparty, Izvestiia Moskovskogo sovela rabochikh i soldatskikh deputatov 17 (24 January 1918).

62. Ronnie Kowalski has concluded that after the Brest peace the Left Communists quickly lostthe support of workers and lower-level officials in Moscow for their revolutionary war and economicprograms, “The Left Communist Movement in 1918: A Preliminary Analysis of its Regional Strength,” Study Group on the Russian Revolution, Sbornik 12 (1986): 32–39.

63. Pechatnik 3–4 (4 April 1918): 4; 7–8 (28 July 1918): 8.

64. Krasnaia Presnia, pp. 460, 465.

65. Ignat'ev, Moskva v pervyi, p. 159.

66. Bershtam, M. S., Issledovaniia noveishei russkoi istorii, vol. 2, Nezavisimoe rabochee dvizhenie v 1916 godu: dokumenty i materialy (Paris: YMCA, 1981), pp. 145–146.Google Scholar

67. Lenin, PSS 50: 90.

68. Ibid., 37: 90–91. Even at this conference twenty-three out of fifty-five delegates were Mensheviks;Pechatnik 7–8 (28 July 1918): 8.

69. Mandel, Petrograd Workers and the Soviet Seizure of Power, analyzes working-class support for the Bolsheviks in 1917 in terms of the rationale of class circumstances.

70. For example, the Moscow oblast committee of the metalworkers’ union in early summer 1918 when commenting about disturbances in some metal plants; TsGAOR 7952/3/212/199.

71. Diane Koenker, “The Evolution of Party Consciousness in 1917: The Case of the MoscowWorkers,” Soviet Studies 30 (January 1978): 38–62. Smith, Red Petrograd, demonstrates that revolutionaryconsciousness emerged out of struggles within factories rather than solely from the actions of the parties themselves.

72. Rosenberg, “Russian Labor and Bolshevik Power,” p. 218.

73. Harding, Lenin's Political Thought 2: 177.

74. Perepiska sekretariata TsK RKP (b) s mestnymi partiinymi organizatsiiami 7 (Moscow, 1972), p. 438, note 1; Chugaev, ed., Rabochii klass, p. 76.

75. Pravda, 31 August 1918, 4 April 1918, 7 July 1918.

76. Voprosy istorii KPSS 6 (1971): 86.

77. Bettelheim, Charles, Class Struggles in the USSR, First Period: 1917–1923 (Brighton, U.K.: Harvester, 1976), p. 302 Google Scholar.

78. Pravda, 5 January 1919, 27 July 1918.

79. Perepiska 3 (Moscow, 1957): 121.

80. Harding, Lenin's Political Thought 2: 196.

81. Perepiska 2 (Moscow, 1957): 171.

82. VII ekslrennyi s “ezd RKP (b), mart 1918 goda: stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow, 1962), pp.171–172.

83. Savel'ev, Vpervi, pp. 110, 124.

84. Liebman, Marcel, Leninism under Lenin, trans. Pearce, Brian (London: Merlin, 1980, p. 308 Google Scholar, states that the first reregistrations were held in 1919; Baganov, I. I., Moskovskie bol'sheviki v ogne revoliutsionnykh boev (Moscow, 1976), p. 143 Google Scholar; Chugaev, ed., Rabochii Mass, p. 96.

85. Perepiska 3 (Moscow, 1967): 64; Pravda, 19 May 1918.

86. The circular letters to local party organizations of 22 and 29 May 1918 are in Perepiska 3: 72–74; 81–83; Pravda 22, 29 May 1918. The term “May program” is from M. M. Helgesen, “The Origins of the Party-State Monolith in Soviet Russia: Relations Between the Soviets and the PartyCommittees in the Central Provinces, October 1917-March 1921,” (Ph.D. diss., State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1980).

87. This is a major theme of Service, Robert, The Bolshevik Party in Revolution, 1917–1923: A Study of Organisational Change (London: Macmillan, 1979 Google Scholar.

88. Kommunist 4 (June 1918): 7. See Helgesen, “Origins of the Party-State Monolith,” p. 194.

89. Kommunist 4 (June 1918): 15.

90. The 28 May city party conference as quoted in Varlamov and Slamikhin, Razoblachenie, p. 372.

91. Perepiska 3: 73; Piatnitskii is quoted in Varlamov and Slamikhin, Razoblachenie, p. 378.

92. Perepiska 3: 73.

93. Skocpol, Theda, States and Social Revolutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 206 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

94. Raleigh, Revolution on the Volga, p. 322.