The Russian Revolution (16 page)

These principles were obviously not egalitarian. But the Bolsheviks never claimed to be egalitarian in the period of revolution and transition to socialism. From the Bolshevik standpoint, it was impossible to regard all citizens as equal when some of them were class enemies of the regime. Thus the 1918 Constitution of the Russian Republic gave the vote to all `toilers' (regardless of sex and nationality), but removed it from members of the exploiting classes and other identifiable enemies of Soviet power-employers of hired labour, persons living on unearned income or from rent, kulaks, priests, former gendarmes and some other categories of Tsarist official, and officers in the White Armies.

The question `Who rules?' may be posed in abstract terms, but it also has the concrete meaning of `Which people get the jobs?' Political power had changed hands, and (as a temporary expedient, the Bolsheviks thought) new bosses had to be found to replace the old ones. Given the Bolshevik cast of mind, class was inevitably a criterion in the selection. Some Bolshevik intellectuals, including Lenin, might argue that education was important as well as class, while a few others worried that workers departing for long periods from the factory bench would lose their proletarian identity. But in the party as a whole, the firm consensus was that the only people who could really be trusted with power by the new regime were proletarians who had been victims of exploitation under the old one. 26

By the end of the Civil War, tens of thousands of workers, soldiers, and sailors-Bolsheviks and those who had fought with them in 1917, in the first instance, but later those who had distinguished themselves in the Red Army or the factory committees, those who were young and comparatively well-educated, or simply those who showed an ambition to rise in the world-had become `cadres', that is, persons holding responsible, usually administrative, jobs. (So had many non-proletarian supporters, including Jews for whom the revolution meant liberation from Tsarist restrictions and new opportunities.27) They were in the Red Army command, the Cheka, the food administration, and the party and soviet bureaucracy. Many were appointed factory managers, usually after working in the local factory committee or trade union. In 1920-1, it was not absolutely clear to the party leaders if and how this process of `worker promotion' could continue on a large scale, since the party's original pool of worker members had been much depleted, and industrial collapse and urban food shortages during the Civil War had dispersed and demoralized the industrial working class of 1917. Nevertheless, the Bolsheviks had found out by experience what they meant by `dictatorship of the proletariat'. It was not a collective class dictatorship exercised by workers who remained in their old jobs at the factory bench. It was a dictatorship run by full-time `cadres' or bosses, in which as many as possible of the new bosses were former proletarians.

4 NEP and the Future of the Revolution

THE Bolsheviks' victory in the Civil War brought them face to face with the country's internal problems of administrative chaos and economic devastation. The towns were hungry and half empty. Coal production had dropped catastrophically, the railways were breaking down, and industry was almost at a standstill. The peasants were mutinously resentful about food requisitioning. Crop sowings had dropped, and two consecutive years of drought had brought the Volga and other agricultural regions to the brink of starvation. Deaths from famine and epidemics in 1921-2 would exceed the combined total of casualties in the First World War and Civil War. The emigration of about two million persons during the years of revolution and war had removed much of Russia's educated elite. A positive demographic development was the migration out of the Pale of hundreds of thousands of Jews, large numbers of whom settled in the capitals.'

There were over five million men in the Red Army, and the ending of the Civil War meant that most of them had to be demobilized. This was a much more difficult operation than the Bolsheviks had anticipated: it meant dismantling a large part of what the new regime had managed to build since the October Revolution. The Red Army had been the backbone of Bolshevik administration during the Civil War and of the economy of War Communism. Moreover, the Red Army soldiers constituted the largest body of `proletarians' in the land. The proletariat was the Bolsheviks' chosen base of social support, and since 1917 they had defined the proletariat for all practical purposes as Russia's workers, soldiers, sailors, and poor peasants. Now a large part of the soldier-and-sailor group was about to disappear; and, worse still, the demobilized soldiers-unemployed, hungry, armed, often stranded far from home by transport breakdowns-were causing turmoil. With over two million demobilized by the early months of 1921, the Bolsheviks had discovered that fighters for the revolution could be transformed overnight into bandits.

The fate of the core proletariat of industrial workers was equally alarming. Industrial closures, military conscription, promotion to administrative work, and, above all, flight from the towns because of hunger had reduced the number of industrial workers from 3.6 million in 1917 to 1.5 million in 1920. A substantial proportion of these workers had returned to the villages, where they still had family, and received plots of land as members of the village communities. The Bolsheviks did not know how many workers were in the villages, or how long they would remain there. Perhaps they had simply been reabsorbed into the peasantry and would never come back to the towns. But, whatever the long-term prospects, the immediate situation was clear: over half of Russia's `dictator class' had vanished.'

The Bolsheviks had originally counted on support for the Russian Revolution from the European proletariat, which seemed poised on the brink of revolution at the end of the First World War. But the postwar revolutionary wave in Europe had subsided, leaving the Soviet regime without any European counterparts that could be regarded as permanent allies. Lenin concluded that the lack of support from abroad made it imperative for the Bolsheviks to obtain support from Russia's peasantry. Yet requisitions and the collapse of the market under War Communism had alienated the peasants, and in some regions they were in open revolt. In Ukraine, a peasant army headed by Nestor Makhno was fighting the Bolsheviks. In Tambov, an important agricultural region of central Russia, a peasant revolt was suppressed only after the dispatch of 50,000 Red Army troops.3

The worst blow to the new regime came in March 1921 when, after an outbreak of workers' strikes in Petrograd, the sailors at the nearby Kronstadt naval base rebelled.' The Kronstadters, heroes of the July Days of 1917 and supporters of the Bolsheviks in the October Revolution, had become almost legendary figures in Bolshevik mythology. Now they were repudiating the Bolsheviks' revolution, denouncing `the arbitrary rule of the commissars' and calling for a true soviet republic of workers and peasants. The Kronstadt revolt occurred while the Tenth Party Congress was in session, and a number of delegates had to leave abruptly to join the elite units of Red Army and Cheka troops sent over the ice to fight the rebels. The occasion could scarcely have been more dramatic, or more calculated to imprint itself on Bolshevik consciousness. The Soviet press, in what seems to have been its first major effort to conceal unpleasant truths, claimed that the revolt was inspired by emigres and led by a mysterious White general. But the rumours circulating at the Tenth Party Congress said otherwise.

The Kronstadt revolt seemed a symbolic parting of the ways between the working class and the Bolshevik Party. It was a tragedy, both to those who thought that the workers had been betrayed and to those who thought that the party had been betrayed by the workers. The Soviet regime, for the first time, had turned its guns on the revolutionary proletariat. Moreover, the trauma of Kronstadt occurred almost simultaneously with another disaster for the revolution. German Communists, encouraged by Comintern leaders in Moscow, attempted a revolutionary uprising that failed miserably. Their defeat meant that even the most optimistic Bolsheviks lost hope that European revolution was imminent. The Russian Revolution would have to survive by its own, unaided efforts.

The Kronstadt and Tambov revolts, both fuelled by economic as well as political grievances, drove home the need for a new economic policy to replace the policy of War Communism. The first step, taken in the spring of 1921, was to end requisitioning of peasant produce and introduce a tax in kind. What this meant in practice was that the state took only a fixed quota instead of everything it could lay hands on (later, after the restabilization of the currency in the first half of the 1920s, the tax in kind became a more conventional money tax).

Since the tax in kind presumably left the peasant with a marketable surplus, the next logical step was to permit a revival of legal private trade and try to close down the flourishing black market. In the spring of 1921, Lenin was still strongly opposed to the legalization of trade, regarding it as a repudiation of Communist principles, but subsequently the spontaneous revival of private trade (often sanctioned by local authorities) presented the Bolshevik leadership with a fait accompli which it accepted. These steps were the beginning of the New Economic Policy, known by the acronym NEP.S It was an improvised response to desperate economic circumstances, undertaken initially with very little discussion and debate (and little evident dissent) in the party and the leadership. The beneficial impact on the economy was swift and dramatic.

Further economic changes followed, amounting to a wholesale abandonment of the system that in retrospect began to be called `War Communism'. In industry, the drive for complete nationalization was abandoned and the private sector was allowed to re-form, though the state retained control of the economy's 'commanding heights', including large-scale industry and banking. Foreign investors were invited to take out concessions for industrial and mining enterprises and development projects. The Finance Commissariat and State Bank began to heed the advice of the old 'bourgeois' financial experts, pushing for stabilization of the currency and limitations on government and public spending. The central government budget was severely cut, and efforts were made to increase state revenue from taxation. Services like schools and medical care, previously free, now had to be paid for by the individual user; access to old-age pensions and sickness and unemployment benefits was restricted by putting them on a contributory basis.

From the Communist standpoint NEP was a retreat, and a partial admission of failure. Many Communists felt deeply disillusioned: it seemed that the revolution had changed so little. Moscow, the Soviet capital since 1918 and headquarters of the Comintern, became a bustling city again in the early years of NEP, although to all outward appearances it was still the Moscow of 1913, with peasant women selling potatoes in the markets, churchbells and bearded priests summoning the faithful, prostitutes, beggars and pickpockets working the streets and railway stations, gypsy songs in the nightclubs, uniformed doormen doffing their caps to the gentry, theatregoers in furs and silk stockings. In this Moscow, the leatherjacketed Communist seemed a sombre outsider, and the Red Army veteran was likely to be standing in line at the Labour Exchange. The revolutionary leaders, quartered incongruously in the Kremlin or the Hotel Luxe, looked to the future with foreboding.

The discipline of retreat

The strategic retreat of NEP, Lenin said, was forced on the Bolsheviks by desperate economic circumstances, and by the need to consolidate the victories that the revolution had already won. Its purpose was to restore the shattered economy and to calm the fears of the non-proletarian population. NEP meant concessions to the peasantry, the intelligentsia, and the urban petty bourgeoisie; relaxation of controls over economic, social, and cultural life; the substitution of conciliation for coercion in the Communists' dealings with society as a whole. But Lenin made it very clear that the relaxation should not extend into the political sphere. Within the Communist Party, `the slightest violation of discipline must be punished severely, sternly, ruthlessly':

When an army is in retreat, a hundred times more discipline is required than when the army is advancing, because during an advance everybody presses forward. If everybody started rushing back now, it would spell immediate and inevitable disaster.... When a real army is in retreat, machine-guns are kept ready, and when an orderly retreat degenerates into a disorderly one, the command to fire is given, and quite rightly, too.

As for other political parties, their freedom to express their views publicly should be even more strictly curtailed than during the Civil War, particularly if they tried to claim the Bolsheviks' new moderate positions as their own.

When a Menshevik says, `You are now retreating; I have been advocating retreat all the time; I agree with you, I am your man, let us retreat together,' we say in reply, `For public manifestations of Menshevism our revolutionary courts must pass the death sentence, otherwise they are not our courts, but God knows what.'6

The introduction of NEP was accompanied by the arrest of a couple of thousand Mensheviks, including all the members of the Menshevik Central Committee. In 1922, a group of right SRs was put on public trial for crimes against the state: some were given death sentences, although the death sentences were apparently not carried out. In 1922 and 1923, some hundreds of prominent Cadets and Mensheviks were forcibly deported from the Soviet Republic. All political parties other than the ruling Communist Party (as the Bolshevik Party was now usually called) were effectively outlawed from this time on.

Lenin's eagerness to crush actual or potential opposition was startlingly demonstrated in a secret letter to the Politburo of 19 March 1922 in which he urged his colleagues to seize the opportunity offered by the famine to break the power of the Orthodox Church. `It is precisely now and only now, when in the starving regions people are eating human flesh, and hundreds if not thousands of corpses are littering the roads, that we can (and therefore must) carry out the confiscation of church valuables with the most savage and merciless energy.' In Shuya, where the campaign to seize church property in aid of famine relief had provoked violent demonstrations, Lenin counselled that `a very large number' of local clergymen and bourgeois must be arrested and put on trial. The trial must end