The Penguin History of Modern Russia Page 13
These fundamental changes in politics and economics demoralized the middle and upper social classes. Only a few diehards tried to form counter-revolutionary associations: the Main Council of the Landowners’ Union still operated and some Imperial Army officers banded together to form a ‘Right Centre’.15 General Kornilov escaped from house arrest outside Petrograd. After several weeks of travel in disguise, he reached southern Russia, where he joined General Alekseev in calling for the formation of a Volunteer Army to bring about the overthrow of the Soviet government. Yet such persons were exceptional. Most industrialists, landlords and officers tried to avoid trouble while hoping for a victory for counter-revolutionary forces. Many went into hiding; others were so desperate that they hurriedly emigrated. They took boats across the Black Sea, trains to Finland and haycarts into Poland. Panic was setting in. About three million people fled the country in the first years after the October Revolution.16
Their exodus caused no regret among the Bolsheviks. The Constitution of the RSFSR, introduced in July 1918, defined the state unequivocally as ‘a dictatorship of the urban and rural proletariat and the poorest’. The right to vote was withdrawn from all citizens who hired labour in pursuit of profit, who derived their income from financial investments or who were engaged in private business.Quickly they became known as ‘the deprived ones’ (lishentsy). In the main, the discrimination against them was based upon economic criteria. The Constitution stressed that this ‘republic of soviets of workers’, soldiers’ and peasants’ deputies’ had been established so as to effect the ‘transition’ to a socialist society. There was a formal specification that ‘he who does not work shall not eat’. Other disenfranchised groups included any surviving members of the Romanov dynasty, former members of the Okhrana and the clergy of all denominations.17 Lenin wanted it to be clearly understood that the RSFSR was going to be a class dictatorship.
Nevertheless there was less of a transformation than at first met the eye; this revolutionary society remained a highly traditional one in many ways. Several workers who had helped to take the Winter Palace on 25 October 1917 had simultaneously helped themselves to the bottles of the Romanov cellars. (Their carousing gave new meaning to calls for a replenishment of the revolutionary spirit.) Vandalism and thuggishness were not uncommon in other places. Traditional working-class behaviour was prominent, warts and all. Sensing that the usual constraints on them had been removed, factory labourers, horsecab-drivers and domestic servants behaved everywhere in a fashion that had once been confined to the poor districts of the towns and cities. Bolsheviks and Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, who had begun by admiring such displays of belligerence, began to understand the negative implications.
At any rate the fact that most workers had voted for socialist parties in elections to the soviets and the Constituent Assembly did not signify that they themselves were committed socialists. After the October Revolution they consulted their sectional interests to an even greater extent than before. Their collectivism was expressed in a factory work-force deciding how to improve its particular conditions without a thought for the ‘general proletarian cause’. Warehouse stocks were ransacked for items which could be put on sale by workers in groups or as individuals. A conscientious attitude to work in the factories and mines had never been a notable virtue of the unskilled and semi-skilled sections of the Russian working class, and the reports of slackness were plentiful. Such a phenomenon was understandable in circumstances of urban economic collapse. Workers were unable to rely on the state for their welfare and looked after themselves as best they could.
Many, too, fell back on to the safety net of the countryside. They were returning to their native villages to find food, to obtain a share of the expropriated land or to sell industrial products. Their customary connections with the rural life were being reinforced.
This same rural life was in vital ways resistant to the kind of revolution desired by the communists: the Russian village organized itself along centuries-old peasant precepts. Peasants were fair, or could be made to be fair, in their dealings with other peasants so long as they belonged to the same village. But rivalries between villages were often violent; and the elders of a given commune seldom agreed to any land passing into the hands of ‘outsiders’ or even of agricultural wage-labourers who had worked for years within the village.18 Furthermore, the peasantry maintained its own ancient order. There was no lightening of the harsh punishment of infringers of tradition. The peasants wanted a revolution that complied with their interests: they wanted their land and their commune; they desired to regulate their affairs without urban interference.
The peasantry already had grounds for resenting Sovnarkom on this score. The February 1918 Decree on the Separation of Church from State had disturbed the Russian Orthodox believers, and they and the various Christian sects were annoyed by the atheistic propaganda emitted from Moscow. At a more materialist level, peasants were also irritated at not being offered a good price for their agricultural produce. Their pleasure in the Decree on Land did not induce them to show gratitude by parting willingly with grain unless they received a decent payment. Each household’s pursuance of its narrow financial interests cast a blight over the working of the entire economy. The food-supplies crisis would become steadily more acute until the peasantry’s attitude could somehow be overcome.
Furthermore, the more or less egalitarian redistribution of land did not bring about an agrarian revolution that might have boosted production. The salient change was social rather than economic. This was the process known as ‘middle-peasantization’. As landholdings were equalized, so the number of peasant households classifiable as rich and poor was reduced. The middling category of peasants (serednyaki) – vaguely-defined though the category remains – constituted the vast bulk of the peasantry in the Russian provinces.19 This shift in land tenure, however, was not usually accompanied by a sharing of implements and livestock so that peasants who lacked either a plough or a cow were consequently reduced to renting out their additional patches of soil to a richer household which already had the wherewithal. There was little sign of rapid progress to a more sophisticated agriculture for Russia. Apart from the expropriation of the gentry, the rural sector of the economy survived substantially unaltered from before the Great War.
To most communists this appeared as a reason to redouble their revolutionary endeavour. Such problems as existed, they imagined, were outweighed by the solutions already being realized. Fervour had to be given further stimulation. Workers, soldiers and peasants needed to be mobilized by Russian Communist Party activists: the message of socialist reconstruction had to be relayed to all corners of the country so that Bolshevism might be understood by everyone.
One of the obstacles was technical. Communication by post and telegraph between cities was woeful; and even when metropolitan newspapers reached the provinces it was not unknown for people to use their pages not for their information but as cigarette-wrappers. Moreover, the villages were virtually cut off from the rest of the country save for the visits made by workers and soldiers (who anyway tended not to return to the cities). The structures of administration were falling apart. Policies enunciated by Sovnarkom were not enforced by the lower soviets if local Bolsheviks objected. Trade unions and factory-workshop committees in the localities snubbed their own supreme bodies. Inside the party the lack of respect for hierarchy was just as remarkable: the Central Committee was asked for assistance, but usually on the terms acceptable to the regional and city party committees.20 The country lacked all system of order.
The problem was not merely administrative but also political: Bolsheviks were in dispute about the nature of their party’s project for revolutionary transformation. Disagreements erupted about matters that had received little attention before October 1917 when the party had been preoccupied with the seizing of power. It was chiefly the pace of change that was controversial. About basic objectives there was consensus; Bolsheviks agreed that the next epoch in p
olitics and economics around the world would involve the following elements: the dictatorship of the proletariat; the state’s ownership and direction of the entire economy; the gathering together of society into large organizational units; and the dissemination of Marxism. At the centre Lenin urged a cautious pace of industrial nationalization and agricultural collectivization whereas Bukharin advocated the more or less immediate implementation of such objectives.21
The friction between Lenin and Bukharin seemed of little significance to most citizens. For although Lenin was a moderate in internal debates among Bolsheviks on the economy, he was an extremist by the standards of the other Russian political parties. Lenin, no less than Bukharin, preached class war against the bourgeoisie; and, for that matter, Lenin was the hard Old Man of Bolshevism on political questions: it was he who had invented the Cheka and destroyed the Constituent Assembly. Consequently it was the common immoderacy of the party that impressed most people.
The communist party therefore had to engage in a propaganda campaign to win supporters and to keep those it already had. Newspaper articles and speeches at factory gates had helped to prepare for the seizure of power. Something more substantial was needed to consolidate the regime. Plans were laid to establish a central party school, whose students would supplement the handful of thousands of activists who had belonged to the communist party before the February Revolution of 1917.22 Discussions were also held about the contents of the new party programme. Yet the communist leaders had not learned how to dispense with Marxist jargon. When the final version was settled in 1919, the language would have foxed all except intellectuals already acquainted with the works of Marx, Engels and Lenin.23 Neither the school nor the programme solved the questions of mass communication.
The Bolshevik central leadership sought to improve the situation in various ways. Posters portraying the entire Central Committee were commissioned. Statues were erected to the heroes of Bolshevism, including Marx and Engels (and even rebels from ancient Rome such as Brutus and Spartacus).24 Busts of Lenin started to be produced, and his colleague Zinoviev wrote the first biography of him in 1918.25 The leadership appreciated, too, the potential of cinema. A short film was made of Lenin showing him shyly pottering around the grounds of the Kremlin with his personal assistant V. D. Bonch-Bruevich. Lenin also agreed to make a gramophone recording of some of his speeches. Few cinemas were in fact operating any longer; but propaganda was also conducted by so-called agit-trains and even agit-steamships. These were vehicles painted with rousing pictures and slogans and occupied by some of the party’s finest orators, who gave ‘agitational’ speeches to the crowds that gathered at each stop on the journey.
The party aimed to monopolize public debate and shut down all Kadet and many Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary newspapers; and the freedom of these parties to campaign openly for their policies was wrecked by the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly as well as by the overruling of elections to the soviets that did not yield a communist party majority.26 Nevertheless the battle of ideas was not entirely ended. The Bolsheviks had secured privileged conditions to engage its adversaries in polemics, resorting to force whenever it wished, but the clandestine groups of the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries continued to operate among the workers and agitate for the replacement of the communists in power.
The communist party had to compete, too, against its coalition partners in 1917–18. The Left Socialist-Revolutionaries largely succeeded in prohibiting the use of force to acquire peasant-owned grain stocks even though several towns were on the verge of famine; they also issued denunciations of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Unlike the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, moreover, they managed to keep their printing presses running even after the party formally withdrew from the governmental coalition in March 1918.27 The Orthodox Church, too, confronted the communists. Tikhon, the Moscow bishop, had been elected Patriarch in November 1917. There had been no Patriarch since 1700; and when the Decree on the Separation of Church from State forbade the teaching of religion in schools and disbarred the Church from owning property, Tikhon anathematized those who propounded atheism.28 The Church relayed this message through its priests to every parish in the country.
Force gave the communists an unrivalled advantage in countering the anti-Bolshevik current of opinion. But force by itself was not sufficient. The enlistment of help from the intelligentsia was an urgent objective for the Bolsheviks. The problem was that most poets, painters, musicians and educators were not sympathetic to Bolshevism. The People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment, led by Anatoli Lunacharski, made efforts to attract them into its activities. It was axiomatic for the Bolsheviks that ‘modern communism’ was constructible only when the foundations of a highly educated and industrialized society had been laid. The ‘proletarian dictatorship’ and the ‘nationalization of the means of production’ were two vital means of achieving the party’s ends. A third was ‘cultural revolution’.
The teachers behaved more or less as the communists wanted. They had to co-operate with Sovnarkom if they wanted to be paid and obtain food rations; and in any case they shared the party’s zeal for universal literacy and numeracy. But artistic intellectuals were a matter of greater concern. They had caused perennial difficulties for the tsars by their commentaries upon political life and had acted as a collective conscience for the Russian nation; and the Bolshevik party worried lest they might start again to fulfil this role in the Soviet state. Official policy towards artists and writers was therefore double sided. On the one hand, intellectuals were subjected to the threat of censorship embodied in the Decree on the Press; on the other, the party appealed to them to lend their support to the revolutionary regime – and material benefits were offered to those willing to comply.
Some responded positively. The operatic bass Fëdr Shalyapin sang his repertoire to packed theatres at cheap seat-prices. The Jewish painter Marc Chagall was given a large studio in Vitebsk where he taught workers to paint. Even the poet Sergei Yesenin believed the best of the Russian Communist Party, declaring that the intelligentsia was like ‘a bird in a cage, fluttering desperately to avoid a calloused, gentle hand that wanted only to take it out and let it fly free’.29 It would be hard to imagine a more naïve statement of trust in the party’s tolerance. Yesenin’s friend and fellow poet Alexander Blok harboured no such illusions; but even Blok felt no hostility to the October Revolution as such. His great poem, The Twelve, caught the chaotic spirit of the times through the image of a dozen ill-disciplined revolutionaries tramping the streets of Petrograd, talking about politics and sex and engaging in occasional acts of thuggery, and Blok was caught between admiration and repulsion for them.
Most intellectuals in the arts and scholarship were more hostile even than Blok to the Bolsheviks and saw the Decree on the Press as a preliminary step towards a comprehensive cultural clampdown. But there were few heroes amidst the intelligentsia. The times precluded the composition of lengthy works castigating Bolshevism: novels are not written in revolutions. Material circumstances, too, had an influence. Intellectuals could not live by ideas alone. Most of them were worse off than workers, who were given larger food rations by Sovnarkom. Increasingly the official authorities tried to suborn the intelligentsia by giving bread and money in return for newspaper articles, posters and revolutionary hymns. Hunger, more than direct censorship, pulled the intellectuals into political line.30 And so a tacit truce was coming into effect. The regime obtained the educative tracts it desired while the intellectuals waited to see what would happen next.
The intelligentsia of the arts, science and scholarship was not alone in being courted by the Bolsheviks. Also indispensable to the maintenance of communist rule was the expertise of engineers, managers and administrators. The dictatorship of the proletariat, as Lenin continued to emphasize, could not dispense with ‘bourgeois’ specialists until a generation of working-class socialist specialists had been trained to replace them.31
More than th
at: Lenin suggested that Russian industry was so backward that its small and medium-size enterprises should be exempted from nationalization and aggregated into large capitalist syndicates responsible for each great sector of industry, syndicates which would introduce up-to-date technology and operational efficiency. Capitalism still had a role to play in the country’s economic development; socialism could not instantly be created. But the Soviet authorities would be able to direct this process for the benefit of socialism since they already owned the banks and large factories and controlled commerce at home and abroad.32 Sovnarkom would preside over a mixed economy wherein the dominant influence would be exerted by socialist institutions and policies. Capitalism, once it had ceased to be useful, would be eradicated.
Lenin’s term for this particular type of mixed economy was ‘state capitalism’, and in April 1918 he encouraged the iron and steel magnate V. P. Meshcherski to submit a project for joint ownership between the government and Meshcherski’s fellow entrepreneurs.33 This pro-capitalist initiative caused an outcry on the Bolshevik party’s Left. Brest-Litovsk had been one doctrinal concession too many for them, and Lenin lacked the political authority to insist on accepting Meshcherski’s project. It is anyway open to query whether Lenin and Meshcherski could have worked together for very long to mutual advantage. Lenin hated the bourgeoisie, depriving it of civic rights after the October Revolution. When it looked as if the Germans were going to overrun Petrograd in January, he had recommended the shooting on the spot of the party’s class enemies.34 Meshcherski was a rare industrialist who briefly considered political cohabitation with Lenin to be feasible.