The Russian Revolution (15 page)

The main direction will be entrusted to various kinds of book-keeping offices or statistical bureaux. There, from day to day, account will be kept of production and all its needs; there also it will be decided whither workers must be sent, whence they must be taken, and how much work there is to be done. And inasmuch as, from childhood onwards, all will have been accustomed to social labour, and since all will understand that this work is necessary and that life goes easier when everything is done according to a pre-arranged plan and when the social order is like a well-ordered machine, all will work in accordance with the indications of the statistical bureaux. There will be no need for special ministers of State, for police or prisons, for laws and decrees-nothing of the sort. Just as in an orchestra all the performers watch the conductor's baton and act accordingly, so here all will consult the statistical reports and will direct their work accordingly.20

This may have sinister overtones to us, thanks to Orwell's Nineteen Eighty four, but in contemporary terms it was bold, revolutionary thinking that was as excitingly modern (and remote from mundane reality) as Futurist art. The Civil War was a time when intellectual and cultural experimentation flourished, and an iconoclastic attitude to the past was de rigueur among young radical intellectuals. Machines-including the `well-ordered machine' of future society-fascinated artists and intellectuals. Sentiment, spirituality, human drama, and undue interest in individual psychology were out of fashion, often denounced as `petty-bourgeois'. Avant-garde artists like the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky and the theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold saw revolutionary art and revolutionary politics as part of the same protest against the old, bourgeois world. They were among the first members of the intelligentsia to accept the October Revolution and offer their services to the new Soviet government, producing propaganda posters in Cubist and Futurist style, painting revolutionary slogans on the walls of former palaces, staging mass reenactments of revolutionary victories in the streets, bringing acrobatics as well as politically relevant messages into the conventional theatre, and designing non-representational monuments to revolutionary heroes of the past. If the avant-garde artists had had their way, traditional bourgeois art would have been liquidated even more quickly than the bourgeois political parties. The Bolshevik leaders, however, were not quite convinced that artistic Futurism and Bolshevism were inseparable natural allies, and took a more cautious position on the classics.

The ethos of revolutionary liberation was more wholeheartedly accepted by the Bolsheviks (or at least by the Bolshevik intellectuals) where women and the family were concerned. The Bolsheviks supported the emancipation of women, as most members of the Russian radical intelligentsia had done since the i86os. Like Friedrich Engels, who had written that in the modern family the husband is the `bourgeois' and the wife the `proletarian', they saw women as an exploited group. By the end of the Civil War, laws had been enacted that made divorce easily attainable, removed the formal stigma from illegitimacy, permitted abortion, and mandated equal rights and equal pay for women.

While only the most radical Bolshevik thinkers talked about destroying the family, there was a general assumption that women and children were potential victims of oppression within the family, and that the family tended to inculcate bourgeois values. The Bolshevik Party established special women's departments (zhenotdely) to organize and educate women, protect their interests, and help them to play an independent role. Young Communists had their own separate organizations-the Komsomol for adolescents and young adults, the Young Pioneers (established a few years later) for the ten to fourteen age group-which encouraged their members to watch out for bourgeois tendencies at home and at school, and try to re-educate parents and teachers who looked back nostalgically to the old days, disliked the Bolsheviks and the revolution, or clung to `religious superstitions'. If one slogan reported during the Civil War, `Down with the capitalist tyranny of parents!', was a bit on the exuberant side for the older Bolsheviks, the spirit of youthful rebellion was generally prized and respected in the party in the early years.

Sexual liberation, however, was a young-Communist cause that rather embarrassed the Bolshevik leadership. Because of the party's position on abortion and divorce, it was widely assumed that the Bolsheviks advocated `free love', meaning promiscuous sex. Lenin certainly did not: his generation was against the philistine morality of the bourgeoisie, but emphasized comradely relations between the sexes and thought promiscuity showed a frivolous nature. Even Aleksandra Kollontai, the Bolshevik leader who wrote most about sexual questions and was something of a feminist, was a believer in love rather than the `glass of water' theory of sex that was often attributed to her.

But the glass of water approach was popular among young Communists, especially the men who had learnt their ideology in the Red Army and regarded casual sex almost as a Communist rite of passage. Their attitude reflected a general wartime and postwar relaxation of morals even more marked in Russia than in other European countries. The older Communists had to put up with it-they assumed that sex was a private matter and, after all, they were revolutionaries and not bourgeois philistines-as they had to put up with Cubists, advocates of Esperanto, and the nudists who, as an act of ideological affirmation, occasionally leapt naked on to crowded Moscow trams. But they felt that such things detracted from the high seriousness of the revolution.

The Bolsheviks in power

Having taken power, the Bolsheviks had to learn to govern. Hardly any of them had administrative experience: by previous occupation, most were professional revolutionaries, or workers, or freelance journalists (Lenin listed his own profession as `man of letters' [literator]). They despised bureaucracies and knew very little about how they worked. They knew nothing about budgets. As Anatolii Lunacharsky, head of the People's Commissariat of Enlightenment, wrote of his first finance officer:

[His] face always bore a mark of deepest astonishment when he brought us money from the bank. It still seemed to him that the Revolution and the organization of the new power were a sort of magical play, and that in a magical play it is impossible to receive real money.2'

During the Civil War, most of the Bolsheviks' organizational talents went into the Red Army, the Food Commissariat, and the Cheka. Capable organizers from the local party committees and soviets were continually being mobilized for the Red Army or sent on trouble-shooting missions elsewhere. The old central government ministries (now People's Commissariats) were run by a small group of Bolsheviks, mainly intellectuals, and staffed largely by officials who had earlier worked for the Tsarist and Provisional Governments. Authority at the centre was confusingly divided between the government (Council of People's Commissars), the soviets' Central Executive Committee, and the Bolshevik Party's Central Committee, with its Secretariat and bureaux for organizational and political affairs, the Orgburo and the Politburo.

The Bolsheviks described their rule as a `dictatorship of the proletariat', a concept which in operational terms had much in common with a dictatorship of the Bolshevik Party. It was clear from the first that this left little room for other political parties: those that were not outlawed for supporting the Whites or (in the case of the left SRs) staging a revolt were harassed and intimidated by arrests during the Civil War and forced into self-liquidation in the early 192os. But it was much less clear what the dictatorship meant in terms of the form of government. The Bolsheviks did not initially think of their own party organization as a potential instrument of government. They seem to have assumed that the party organization would remain separate from government and free of administrative functions, just as it would have done if the Bolsheviks had become the governing party in a multi-party political system.

The Bolsheviks also described their rule as `soviet power'. But this was never a very accurate description, in the first place because the October Revolution was essentially a party coup, not a soviet one, and in the second place because the new central government (chosen by the Bolshevik Central Committee) had nothing to do with the soviets. The new government took over control of the various ministerial bureaucracies from the Provisional Government, which in turn had inherited them from the Tsar's Council of Ministers. But the soviets did acquire a role at local level, where the old administrative machinery had completely collapsed. They (or more precisely their executive committees) became the local organs of the central government, creating their own bureaucratic departments of finance, education, agriculture, and so on. This administrative function gave point to the soviets' existence, even after soviet elections had become little more than a formality.

At first, the central government (Council of People's Commissars) seemed the hub of the new political system. But by the end of the Civil War, there were already signs that the Bolshevik Party's Central Committee and Politburo were tending to usurp the government's powers, while at local level the party committees were becoming dominant over the soviets. This primacy of party over state organs was to become a permanent feature of the Soviet system. It has been argued, however, that Lenin (who became seriously ill in 1921 and died in 1924) would have resisted any such tendency if he had not been removed from the scene by illness, and that he intended that the government rather than the party should play the dominant role.22

Certainly for a revolutionary and the creator of a revolutionary party, Lenin had an oddly conservative streak when it came to institutions. He wanted a real government, not some kind of improvised directorate, just as he wanted a real army, real laws, and perhaps even, in the final analysis, a real Russian Empire. However, it must be remembered that the members of this government were always in effect chosen by the Bolshevik Central Committee and its Politburo. Lenin headed the government, but he was also de facto head of the Central Committee and the Politburo; and it was these party organs rather than the government that dealt with the crucial military and foreign-policy questions during the Civil War. From Lenin's point of view, the big advantage of the government side of the system was probably that its bureaucracies included many technical experts (specialists on finance, engineering, law, public health, and so on), whose skills Lenin thought it essential to use. The Bolshevik Party was developing a bureaucracy of its own, but it did not employ outsiders who were not party members. In the party, and especially among its working-class members, there was great suspicion of `bourgeois experts'. This had already been clearly demonstrated in the strong Bolshevik opposition in 1918-t9 to the army's use of military professionals (the former Tsarist officers).

The nature of the political system that emerged after the Bolsheviks took power must be explained not only in terms of institutional arrangements but also in terms of the nature of the Bolshevik Party. It was a party with authoritarian tendencies, and one that had always had a strong leader-even, according to Lenin's opponents, a dictatorial one. Party discipline and unity had always been stressed. Before 1917, Bolsheviks who disagreed with Lenin on any important issue usually left the party. In the period 191720, Lenin had to deal with dissent and even organized dissident factions within the party, but he seems to have regarded this as an abnormal and irritating situation, and finally took decisive steps to change it (see below pp. ioo-i). As to opposition or criticism from outside the party, the Bolsheviks had no tolerance for it either before or after the revolution. As Vyacheslav Molotov, a young associate of Lenin and Stalin, commented admiringly many years later, Lenin was even more tough-minded than Stalin in the early 1920S and `would not have tolerated any opposition, if that had been an option'.23

Another key characteristic of the Bolshevik Party was that it was working class-by its own self-image, by the nature of its support in the society, and to a substantial degree in terms of party membership. In the folk wisdom of the party, working-class Bolsheviks were `tough', while Bolsheviks from the intelligentsia tended to be `soft'. There is probably some truth to this, although Lenin and Trotsky, both intellectuals, were notable exceptions. The party's authoritarian, illiberal, rough, and repressive traits may well have been reinforced by the influx of working-class and peasant members in 1917 and the Civil War years.

The Bolsheviks' political thinking revolved around class. They believed that society was divided into antagonistic classes, that the political struggle was a reflection of the social one, and that members of the urban proletariat and other formerly exploited classes were the revolution's natural allies. By the same token, members of the old privileged and exploiting classes were regarded by the Bolsheviks as natural enemies.24 While the Bolsheviks' attachment to the proletariat was an important part of their emotional make-up, their hatred and suspicion of `class enemies'-former nobles, members of the capitalist bourgeoisie, kulaks (prosperous peasants), and others-was equally profound, and perhaps even more significant in the long term. As far as the Bolsheviks were concerned, the old privileged classes were not just counter-revolutionary by definition; the mere fact of their existence constituted a counter-revolutionary conspiracy. This internal conspiracy was all the more threatening because, as both theory and the reality of foreign intervention in the Civil War demonstrated, it was backed by the forces of international capitalism.

In order to consolidate the proletarian victory in Russia, the Bolsheviks believed, it was necessary not only to eliminate the old patterns of class exploitation but also to reverse them. One way of reversing them was to apply principles of `class justice':

In the old law-courts, the class minority of exploiters passed judgement upon the working majority. The law-courts of the proletarian dictatorship are places where the working majority passes judgement upon the exploiting minority. They are specially constructed for the purpose. The judges are elected by the workers alone. The judges are elected solely from among the workers. For the exploiters, the only right that remains is the right of being judged."