A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

This dual process involved a number of simultaneous developments within the party-state. There was no master plan. When the Bolsheviks came to power they had no set idea — other than the general urge to control and centralize — of how to structure the institutional relationships between the party and the Soviets. These relationships grew spontaneously out of the general conditions of the revolution. The local Soviets and party organs were highly decentralized and improvised in nature during the early months of 1918. Many of them declared their own local 'republics' and 'dictatorships' which blindly ignored the directives of Moscow. Indeed it had become so common for the rural Soviets to tear up the decrees of the central government for cigarette paper that when Lenin gave his agitators the Decree on Land to take into the countryside he also gave them old calendars to distribute in the hope that these might be torn up instead of the decree.⁵⁵ Kaluga Province became proverbial for its resistance to centralized authority in 1918. There was a Sovereign Soviet Republic of Autonomous Volosts in Kaluga. It was the closest Russia ever came to an anarchist structure of power, with the Soviet of each volost empowered to set up border controls in its territory. Thus the agents of the state in Moscow were obliged to obtain a passport from each separate Soviet as they passed from one village to another. Only during the civil war, when they stressed the need for strict centralized control to mobilize the resources of the country, did the Bolsheviks plan the general structure of the party-state.

Their first priority was to win control of the Soviets and other vital organs, such as the trade unions. The Mensheviks and SRs still had a presence in these bodies, albeit as 'non-party' delegates after their parties were banned in the summer of 1918.* All the Communist electoral tactics employed in this century to subvert democratic bodies were first developed in the Russian civil war. The Bolsheviks engaged in widespread ballot-rigging and intimidation of the opposition. Voting at Soviet and trade union congresses was nearly always done by an open show of hands so that to vote against the Bolsheviks was to invite harassment from the Cheka, whose presence was always strongly felt at election meetings. With a secret ballot the Bolsheviks would not have won very many elections. 'Soviets without the Communists!' was increasingly the slogan of the workers and the peasants. But the Bolsheviks did away with this 'convention of bourgeois democracy' on the grounds that a secret ballot was no longer needed in the 'higher form of freedom' apparently enjoyed by the Soviet people.

* From 1918 to 1922 the ban on the Mensheviks and the SRs would be briefly lifted from time to time. But even during these periods the Bolsheviks would persecute their activists.

And with the system of open voting — which was the tradition of the Russian village commune — there were very few elections they could lose. Even the artists of the Marinsky Opera, hardly a bastion of Communism, voted unanimously for the Bolsheviks in the Soviet elections of 1919.

The enforcement of voting by party slates also worked to the advantage of the Bolsheviks. As the only legal party within the Soviets, they alone could meet as a caucus to co-ordinate strategy, whereas other parties and factions remained divided on the Congress floor. It meant that, even as a small minority, the Bolsheviks could often win elections in the local Soviets by presenting themselves as the only party capable of being held responsible for the actions of the central government. With a bare majority the Bolshevik slate in its entirety would often form the Soviet executive rather than seats being allocated according to the strength of the different factions. It was a case of winner takes all.

Once in command of the Soviet executives, the Bolsheviks aimed to centralize power under their control. Soviet congresses were seldom called and, in their absence, power was exercised by the Soviet executives along with their permanent departmental staffs, which were appointed in each policy area. The socialist opposition called this the ispolkomshchina, or executive dictatorship. During the revolutionary period the Soviet executives had been largely made up of peasant and worker volunteers. But they were now increasingly made up of full-time professional bureaucrats paid by the central party-state and only seldom re-elected. Plough-pushers were giving way to pen-pushers.