4

Proletarian Rule and Mixed Economy

Classical Marxism does not define dictatorship of the proletariat in the narrow modern-day sense—authoritarian rule by a small minority claiming to represent the interests of working people. Rather, it means political rule by the working class itself. It doesn’t imply a one-party state or a generally repressive political culture, but rather the working class winning the battle of democracy. This means establishing a workers’ democracy facilitated by political pluralism and freedom of expression, and in a form that is more directly available and immediately relevant to the proletarian majority than is the case under capitalist democracy.

Marxism also understands political realities to be grounded in economic realities, historical development as being inseparable from underlying economic development. When we speak of an economy we are referring—most elementally—to the activities and relationships people enter into, and the resources they use, to get the things that they need (such as food, clothing, shelter) and the things that they want (such as rings and necklaces and other forms of personal adornment, toys and other playthings, entertaining activities and experiences, forms or sources of music, sources of knowledge—whether from storytellers, books, lecturers, or works of art). Without the essentials—such as food—there will be no life at all, and without at least some of the nonessentials there will be no joy in life.

Regarding the activities and resources to create these things, we can see that human labor is primary—making use of tools and technologies to fashion what is needed and wanted from various raw materials and natural resources. In terms of relationships, an economy can involve a small tribal cluster or kin group working cooperatively in hunting and gathering, perhaps ultimately through early agriculture (gardens and flocks, crops and herds), in which all share in the labor and the fruits of their collective labor. It can also involve powerful minorities demanding that laboring majorities provide them with the agricultural surplus, supplemented with surplus labor. It can also involve powerful minorities directly exploiting—one way or another—the labor of diverse majorities. It can involve, over time and with the development of nation-states, the development of increasingly complex relationships and growing interdependence within national economic systems. This growing complexity and interdependence has been deepened and pushed forward, and made increasingly global, by the naturally voracious expansionism inherent in the core dynamics of the capitalist form of economy.

The underlying forces at work in the global economy—captured in the conceptualization of uneven and combined development—involve the interplay and coming together of different forms of economy, such as what came into existence in the massive and unstable entity known as tsarist Russia. We have seen that the complexity and instability have resulted in undulating currents, whirlpools, and successive waves of crisis and discontent. This, in turn, contributed mightily to the class conflicts, social struggles, political turmoil, and revolutionary upheaval that have been the focus of this study.

In October/November 1917 this culminated in the triumph of workers’ power, supported by the peasantry, led by the Bolsheviks and their allies. The question then became, how would the transition to socialism be accomplished? As Marxists, the Bolshevik leaders knew that it could not be accomplished “just as they pleased”—but only within the context of the actual, material, economic, social, cultural realities within which they had been living their lives and making their revolution. As the saying goes, “it’s complicated”—particularly given the complexities, the interdependencies, and the multiple crises, as well as the underlying, overarching, all-encompassing trajectories of historical development previously alluded to. What the Bolshevik leaders did or failed to do would be decisive—but also decisive would be immense realities within Russia and globally, which they might influence but over which they had no control. This must be comprehended as we try to make sense of how the newly dominant institutions of workers’ power sought to move in the direction of socialism.

In the present chapter we will examine the earliest economic orientations developed by the Bolshevik regime. It will be argued that what it hoped for was not the direct passage into socialism but instead the creation of a transitional “mixed economy.” Such an interpretation is not commonly stressed in regard to the early Soviet Republic. Many analysts view such relative moderation as inconsistent with the extreme radicalism of Bolshevism under Lenin and Trotsky. Everything they did is interpreted as either a heroic or horrific effort to implement “socialism” in economically backward Russia (whose economic backwardness and impoverishment would preclude—as we saw Marx himself insisting in Chapter 1—a genuinely socialist society, since if “want is generalized, and with want the struggle for necessities begins again,” then “all the old crap will revive”). In fact, Lenin and Trotsky did not believe socialism was possible in the Russia of 1917–23. They believed that socialism would need to be based on a highly integrated and technologically advanced economy, providing a level of economic abundance that would not be achieved in Russia for many years and could not—given the realities and interdependence of the global economy—be achieved in a single country. Lenin, Trotsky, and their comrades believed that it would be possible and necessary for revolutionary Russia to move in the direction of socialism, but that this could not be completed until working-class revolutions in other countries—especially more advanced capitalist countries—swept more of the planet into a socialist trajectory. The best that revolutionary Russia could do in the period immediately following 1917 would be establishing a state-regulated capitalism, combined with social policies beneficial to the laboring masses, and with the development of some economic sectors operating according to socialist principles—or, what is commonly known as a “mixed economy.”

Over the years there has been—from left, right, and center—skepticism over the viability of such a project. It is not possible here to provide a general review of the matter, but aspects of the question were highlighted admirably in a discussion of a different revolution later in the twentieth century. “An economy which is half capitalist and half socialist, which would mean functioning half according to the logic of profit and half according to the logic opposing profit, doesn’t exist and cannot exist in any country in the world,” wrote the perceptive analyst Adolfo Gilly in 1980, in an article dealing with the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua. “In all countries adopting the ‘mixed economy’ label, this only means capitalism with a more or less extensive state sector subordinated to the logic of accumulation for a strong private sector.” Gilly pointed out that a strong nationalized sector of the economy in no way “guarantees” a transition to socialism. “It is well known that private enterprise, particularly in industry, in many countries favors and advocates the existence of such a sector as a guarantee to lower costs, to develop the infrastructure and economic resources, freeing them from what would be severe financial commitments.”1 Gilly argued, however, that Nicaragua’s “mixed economy” was unlike any in the world, because the mass insurrection led by a consciously revolutionary force had smashed the existing capitalist state and replaced it with new institutions of popular power.

The same can be said of what initially happened in Russia. In each case a special framework was established by the fact that a more or less proletarian government had been brought to power by a working people’s revolution. It is that first manifestation of proletarian dictatorship and mixed economy that will be the focus of this chapter.

We will see proliferating contradictions both between each of these two elements (workers’ democracy and mixed economy) and within them—contradictions that become increasingly glaring and which, in some cases, would seem to have been predictable. This, in turn, raises obvious questions regarding the clarity of thought on the part of the Bolshevik leadership. If they were as brilliant as some of them seemed to have been, why didn’t they understand the profound lack of viability in what they were advocating? Why didn’t they perceive the disasters that would obviously result from the revolutionary trajectory they were charting? Such questions take on a sharper edge when we realize that they were being raised at the time by left-wing critics, among the Mensheviks and Right-Socialist Revolutionaries and within the ranks of the Second International (for example, Karl Kautsky). The Bolsheviks denounced such critics for their excessive moderation, but some later historians have been inclined to commend them for their sanity.

Simplistic condemnation of the Bolsheviks and their revolution is easily and commonly employed by those dealing with such questions—but perhaps it is better to take the matter more seriously. It is not necessary to agree with what Lenin, Trotsky, and their comrades chose to do in order to reach for an understanding of why they chose the revolutionary path, and how they proposed to overcome the contradictions that they themselves certainly saw in advance. In the remainder of this study we will give attention to the seemingly shrewd assumptions that were key factors in their revolutionary perspectives, potentialities whose realization they anticipated as providing solutions to the inevitable problems. In doing this, we will also be dealing with miscalculations that would end up deepening the contradictions when the solutions were not forthcoming. We will give attention as well to achievements and positive legacies as we consider, nonetheless, tragic developments that would subvert and overwhelm what was profoundly good in the dreams and efforts of these heroic Communists.

Workers’ Democracy and Mixed Economy

The Bolshevik seizure of power was far less violent than many other revolutions. On the other hand, immense devastation had taken place before the Bolshevik revolution, largely due to the First World War. In the first three years of the war, 18 million Russians were engaged in the conflict—including many of the most skilled elements from the labor force—and about 2.5 million were killed at the front. We have seen that Russia was not a highly industrialized country, but practically the whole of industry was devoted to war production. Much of the produce of agriculture was also diverted to military needs. The need of tsarist Russia to “keep up” militarily with far more highly industrialized nations put an immense strain on the Russian economy. The country was unable to invest its capital into meeting consumers’ needs, into meeting social needs, or even into meeting the needs of the economy (such as repair of infrastructure and machinery). Rather, it was compelled to meet the war crisis by “living on its capital,” with disastrous results. Equipment and manpower began to wear out, as debts (including a billowing foreign debt) accumulated and shortages spread throughout the economy. Looking back from 1922, Trotsky commented: “All these circumstances . . . directly predetermined the October Revolution, the triumph of the proletariat and its subsequent difficulties.” Indeed, the Bolsheviks faced a bleak situation upon taking power. By October 1917, the number of locomotives needing repair was 5,500, 30 percent of the whole, and this was only “the beginning of the complete breakdown of the railway system,” one contemporary scholar noted, “which the Bolsheviks, in spite of extreme efforts, could not check or even retard.” It has been estimated that average industrial production in 1916–17 was only 71 percent of prewar levels, and that by the autumn of 1917 it had plummeted further. Given the worsening rate of exchange between town and countryside, peasants found that it made little economic sense to put their grain on the market.2

Shortly after the Bolsheviks stormed the Winter Palace, four left-wing journalists from the United States—John Reed, Louise Bryant, Albert Rhys Williams, and Bessie Beatty—gathered together to evaluate the swirl of events. Beatty had been advised by a US official to stock up on sardines and retire to the home of a woman friend for a few weeks, since “the people will be dying of starvation on the streets within a week, and there won’t be any izvostchiks [cab drivers] to carry you around, because the horses will all starve to death.” Beatty confided to her friends her concern over the high expectations of the Russian masses supporting the revolution: “I’d hate to be in Lenin’s shoes. They expect so much. I just saw [Raymond] Robins [of the American Red Cross]. He says there was only three days’ supply of bread when the Winter Palace fell—whenever that was. Yesterday? Anyway . . . Lenin has promised them so much—” Interrupting, Williams snapped: “He has promised them nothing except the chance to run this poor, bankrupt, bewildered, bruised and suffering Russia themselves.” As Beatty later recounted, in the early months of Soviet power the Bolsheviks succeeded in their energetic efforts to hold off “the great grey wolf” of famine. “It was not until he [i.e., the wolf] made an alliance with the human enemy of Russia that he finally broke through and brought death to the hungry people.” She was referring to the economic embargo, and military invasion and foreign support for the counterrevolutionary Civil War. Even before this catastrophe, however, the economy was clearly in trouble. “It was impossible at any time during the year [from 1917 to 1918] to buy any of the necessities of life without standing in a queue,” Beatty reported, and many working women forced to stand in the long lines would grumble to each other: “It is no good for the government to be Socialist if the queue grows longer every day.”3 Indeed, the Bolshevik leaders themselves recognized that this was not the material base on which socialism could come into being.

Before the Bolsheviks took power, Lenin himself stressed this point time and again. In his April Theses, he stressed that “it is not our immediate task to ‘introduce’ socialism, but only to bring social production and the distribution of products at once under the control of the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies.” After the Bolshevik insurrection, such control (as opposed to sweeping economic collectivization) defined Bolshevik policy. Nonetheless, “the spontaneous inclination of the workers to organize factory committees and to intervene in the management of the factories was inevitably encouraged by a revolution,” notes historian E. H. Carr, “which led the workers to assume that the productive machinery of the country now belonged to them and could be operated by them at their own discretion and to their own advantage.” And yet, he insists, “extensive nationalization of industry was . . . no part of the initial Bolshevik program” in the wake of the October/November revolution. In December 1917, prominent University of Wisconsin sociologist E. A. Ross, who was conducting fieldwork in the new Soviet Republic, asked Trotsky if the Bolsheviks intended to nationalize industry. Trotsky replied: “No. We are not ready yet to take over all industry. That will come in time, but no one can say how soon. For the present we expect out of the earnings of a factory to pay the owner five or six percent yearly on his investment. What we aim at now is control, rather than ownership.” Ross asked how new industries would develop. “We can impose on the capitalist to whom we allow a dividend of five or six percent,” Trotsky answered, “the obligation to reinvest in some industry a part—say, twenty-five percent—of what he receives.” Ross suggested that capitalists would prefer to invest their capital abroad, where they could expect two or three times the return on investments. “They won’t be allowed to remove their capital from Russia at will,” Trotsky replied. He explained: “We will see to it that the factory is run not from the point of view of private profit, but from the point of view of the social welfare democratically conceived.”4

Soviet historian Roy Medvedev notes that upon taking power the Soviet government immediately carried out a “list of long overdue and very timely revolutionary reforms,” but that “there was nothing socialist per se in any of these reforms,” although the introduction of workers’ control “had a plainly socialist tinge.” Medvedev adds that “we can see from Lenin’s notes that after the October revolution it was not the intention of the Bolsheviks to nationalize a substantial number of businesses.” E. H. Carr explains: “Left to themselves the workers could, in the nature of things, rarely provide the technical skill or industrial discipline or knowledge of accountancy necessary for the running of a factory.” The banks were nationalized, and from November 1917 to March 1918 about 850 legislative acts were issued by central authorities, resulting in the nationalization of individual companies, various monopoly groups, and certain mining districts and economic sectors, resulting in an important state sector of the economy. But, as Maurice Dobb pointed out a few years later, there were no moves toward nationalization “in the sudden and sweeping manner the day after the revolution that the popular imagination in Western Europe seems to picture. . . . The interference of the State in economic affairs was mainly confined to finance, to certain branches of trade and to general regulation and control, such as happened in most belligerent countries during the [first world] war, and as had already under the Tsar acquired the name of ‘war socialism.’” Of course, in the context of proletarian revolution and under a workers’ state, such measures took on a more “socialist tinge,” as Medvedev has put it, and Dobb observed that matters sometimes went further than just described: “When prior to June 28th [1918] specific enterprises were nationalized, this was usually due to some special circumstances applying to that particular business, or to the unauthorized action of local bodies, which tended in the early days to do most things on their own initiative and frequently to be somewhat scornful of centralized authority, particularly in areas where Left S.R. influence was strong.”5

Despite Trotsky’s more conservative comments, an initial Bolshevik drift in this radical direction could be seen in late 1917—which is hardly surprising, given the burst of working-class militancy that brought the Bolsheviks to power in the first place. By early 1918, however, a sharp controversy erupted. Lenin called for an end to the escalating trend of nationalization and expropriation, insisting on a compromise with large capitalists. “The new economic order would rely on limited state ownership,” explains Stephen Cohen, “while preserving private (or joint) ownership and management in most enterprises.” Lenin utilized the term state capitalism to describe what was, as Cohen put it, “a mixed economy combining a limited public sector with a large private one.” Lenin saw “no contradiction in the proposition that a proletarian state might preside over a state capitalist economy.”6

But disagreement over this helped generate a Left Communist faction within Lenin’s own party. One of its leaders was Nikolai Bukharin, who protested: “State capitalism under the dictatorship of the proletariat—this is an absurdity, soft-boiled boots.” Another leader, Valerian Obolensky (more commonly known by the name N. Osinsky), called for “a decisive liquidation of private property, the introduction of the socialist system, and the direct transition to communism.” The Left Communist platform warned against the policy “of agreements with capitalistic businessmen, both the ‘patriotic’ ones and the international ones who stand behind them,” insisting that “the Russian workers’ revolution cannot ‘save itself’ by leaving the international revolutionary path, steadily avoiding a fight, retreating in the face of the pressure of international capital, and making concessions to ‘patriotic capital.’” Such a policy of retreat would undermine revolutionary internationalism as well as proletarian democracy. Instead, it was necessary to move forward: “The energetic organization of production on socialist lines will on the one hand strengthen the economic base of the proletariat as a revolutionary force, and on the other will be a new school of class organization and activity for it.”7

Lenin responded that the workers “have no experience of independent work in organizing giant enterprises which serve the needs of scores of millions of people.” It was necessary, he insisted, “to learn from the capitalist organizers” and to proceed “cautiously” and “gradually.” He stressed: “The difference between socialization and simple confiscation is that confiscation can be carried out by ‘determination’ alone, without the ability to calculate and distribute properly, whereas socialization cannot be brought about without this ability.” Against romantic and impatient conceptions, he insisted that “the bricks of which socialism will be composed have not yet been made.” Lenin argued that two preconditions must be realized to allow the development of socialism: (1) “large-scale capitalist engineering based on the latest discoveries of modern science,” combined with “planned state organization, which keeps tens of millions of people to the strictest observance of a unified standard in production and distribution,” and (2) the proletariat’s secure position as “the ruler of the state.” He noted that “history . . . has taken such a peculiar course that it has given birth in 1918 to two unconnected halves of socialism.” In Germany the economic prerequisite of a highly developed and concentrated industrial economy existed, but “the revolution in Germany is still slow in ‘coming forth,’” so that the political rule of the working class had yet to be realized. In Russia, on the other hand, the political prerequisite had been established, but on the economic plane “petty-bourgeois capitalism prevails,” necessitating the building up by the proletarian state of “large-scale state capitalism” which Lenin believed must constitute part of “the period of transition from capitalism to socialism.” There are indications that at least some sectors of the Russian bourgeoisie (and even some foreign capitalist firms) were open to participating in such “state capitalist” development.8

The Left Communists’ opposition to Lenin’s perspective seems to have reflected a broader impatience felt by many Russian workers. Dobb pointed out the existence of “syndicalist and centrifugal tendencies among the factory committees,” commenting that “in place of nationalization, there was a wholesale and chaotic ‘expropriation’ of enterprises on local initiative, in some cases in strict violation of Article 9 of the General Instructions on Workers’ Control.” Alec Nove concurs: “The large majority (over two-thirds) of nationalizations were local, until June 1918, and may have been due to genuinely local decisions. These in turn could have been due to over-enthusiasm, or responses to real or imagined sabotage, or the indignant refusal of employers to accept orders from workers’ councils.” Nonetheless, a Bolshevik majority lined up behind Lenin’s policy of developing a composite system “in which there is large-scale Socialist economy, private capitalist economy, and State enterprises temporarily leased to private capital.” Dobb observed that this was “superficially similar in form to what may sometimes be found in capitalist countries, but possessing the fundamental difference that power has been transferred to the organs of the working class.”9

This is precisely the orientation articulated by Alexei Rykov, who was chosen to head the Supreme Council of National Economy—known as the Vesenkha—established in November 1917. Intended to function as the executive body of a nationwide Economic Soviet (just as Sovnarkom, the executive body of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets, was to function as Soviet Russia’s leading political body), the Vesenkha never cohered in that manner amid the economic chaos of the time. But it helped to define the mixed-economy orientation. While emphasizing that he was not questioning the impossibility of a viable economy that would be half-socialist and half-capitalist, Rykov also stressed that “we are in a position to nationalize, and to administer nationalized enterprises, only in a part of industry.”10

Lenin had insisted in the period leading up to the Bolshevik revolution that “the way to avert a catastrophe is to establish a real workers’ control over the production and distribution of goods.” He was quite clear on how this was to be implemented:

To establish such control it is necessary, first, to make certain that in all the basic institutions there is a majority of workers, not less than three-fourths of all the votes, and that all owners who have not deserted their business, as well as the scientifically and technically trained personnel, are compelled to participate; secondly, that all the shop and factory committees, the central and local Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies, as well as trade unions, be granted the right to participate in such control, that all commercial and bank accounts be open to their inspection, and that the management be compelled to supply them with all data; and, thirdly, that the representatives of all the more important democratic and socialist parties be granted the same right.

Workers’ control, already recognized by the capitalists in a number of cases where conflicts arise, should be immediately developed, by way of a series of carefully considered and gradual, but immediately realizable, measures, into complete regulation of the production and distribution of goods by the workers.11

It was this orientation that Lenin sought to implement in the wake of the October/November revolution. The eyewitness sociologist E. A. Ross observed that “while there are plenty of syndicalists urging the workmen of each factory to organize, cast out the owner and his agents, and run it as their own, the Bolsheviks are guilty of no such folly.” Here he obviously bases his remarks on the policy of Lenin and Trotsky, and of the central government: “They see clearly that such methods would end in anarchy. What they aim for is workers’ control of industry. In some matters the capitalist will be free, in others bound by the factory committee, in still others bound by rules laid down by local workers’ councils or the central authorities.” E. H. Carr reports on instances “in which workers or factory committees, having evicted the managers, later went to them and begged them to return” once they found themselves unable to maintain the factory’s operations. Nove comments that “the evidence, though mixed, is still consistent with the intention to maintain a mixed economy for a considerable period.” This also corresponds to Joseph Freeman’s findings in his early account of The Soviet Worker. “On assuming power, the Soviet Government’s immediate aim in the economic field was to establish a planned system of production and distribution which would steadily improve the living conditions of the people,” wrote Freeman. “It did not, however, plan the immediate nationalization of industry. Lenin looked upon the socialist reorganization of industry as a long and gradual process.” Far from trying to create socialism by decree, the Bolshevik leadership thought “the early stages would involve the coordination and control of industry by the workers’ state; but the state would at first not take over the actual ownership and management of industry. The workers were to be employed by the old owners and protected by the new state.”12

It is worth lingering, however, over a complex set of contradictions embedded in the very heart of this mixed-economy approach—the divergent lures, for Russian capitalists, of cooperation with and, at the same time, resistance to the revolutionary regime. “At a time when the Russian economy, shattered by war and revolution, was plunging downward into a gulf of anarchy and disintegration,” according to E. H. Carr, “a certain tacit community of interests could be detected between the government and the more sensible and moderate of the industrialists in bringing about a return to some kind of orderly production.” Yet Carr also points out that any such cooperation was necessarily “uneasy, distrustful, and quasi-hostile.” How could it be otherwise? Even in this period of presumed Leninist “moderation,” as Lars Lih points out, Lenin was declaring: “We will be merciless to our enemies and just as merciless to all wavering elements from our own midst who dare to bring disorganization to our difficult creative work of constructing a new life for the working people.” Carr himself offers a similar pronouncement by Lenin from this period, when he described the Vesenkha as “the fighting organ for the struggle with the capitalists and the landlords in the economic sphere, just as the Sovnarkom is in politics.”13

The Bolsheviks were absolutely committed to the elimination of capitalism altogether as soon as it was deemed possible, and they were doing all that they could to create that possibility. The capitalists, as a class, were absolutely committed to maximizing their profits and to maintaining the economic system that generated such profits—again, by all possible means. Neither side had any illusions about the desires and intentions of the other side. The resulting insecurity ensured a permanently terrible “business climate” that made unlikely the long-term viability of the cooperative relationship.

The resolution to this contradiction would seem to be this: Lenin and his comrades were not assuming that the mixed economy would have a long duration. They assumed the catastrophic world war that had swept Russia decisively on the revolutionary path would sweep other advanced capitalist countries onto the same path. They did not anticipate long-term isolation for the Soviet Republic within a global capitalist economy; they assumed the opposite: the spread of workers’ revolutions through eastern Europe, into Germany, Italy, France, Britain, and beyond, creating a United Socialist States of Europe, supplemented in various ways and at various times by revolutionary insurgencies in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Some of these expectations, and the ways they were frustrated, will be considered in the next chapter. But first we will turn our attention to twists and loops within Bolshevism, the collapse of the mixed-economy orientation, and diverse aspects of the human drama unfolding within such contexts as these.

Twists and Loops

Reality is complex, containing twists and loops, contradictions and complex divergences—and we find abundant examples when we look at revolutionary Russia. We can also find this in the thinking, theorizations, and pronouncements of Lenin and his comrades—divergent trends within Bolshevism, coexisting with those that we have stressed so far, which had an impact on policy and practice in ways that contradicted the basic orientation and undermined the basic goals advanced by Lenin and other leaders of the revolution.

The Bolsheviks’ Marxism included more than simply Lenin’s thought, but the Marxism of Lenin was a central element within Bolshevism and it contained a dynamic convergence of different elements. Boris Souvarine aptly quotes him during a moment when he reproached some comrades for “repeating a formula divorced from the series of circumstances which had produced it and assured its success, and applying it to conditions essentially different.” Sometimes Lenin would seek to “speak French” when Russian realities seemed to approximate those that had brought the French Revolution, and when realities shifted in the opposite direction, he would “speak German,” advancing the patient organizational approach reflected in the German Social Democracy’s Erfurt Program. But “he never ceased ‘speaking Russian,’” Souvarine tells us, “sounding all possibilities, weighing opportunities, calculating the chances of keeping the Party on the right track, avoiding alike belated or premature insurrection inspired by romantic motives, and constitutional and parliamentary illusions.” It is worth further following Souvarine’s insightful description of Lenin’s approach:

Always to “speak Russian,” even when borrowing theory and practice from other revolutionary movements, this was the secret of his superiority over his adversaries. He was a disciple of Marx, but undogmatic, eager in the pursuit of science and knowledge, always alive to the teachings of experience, capable of recognizing, surmounting and making good his errors, and consequently of rising above himself.14

Still, the dynamic theoretical methodology, with its consequent incorporation of diverse elements, naturally generated complications in the conceptualizations of Lenin and his comrades. One complication has to do with their conceptualization of the French Revolution of 1789–99, especially the role of the revolutionary Jacobins—and its implications for Bolshevik practice. A second complication relates to Lenin’s conceptualization of state capitalism—and, once again, the implications for Bolshevik practice.

The Jacobin Puzzle

In 1920, Albert Mathiez, one of the great historians of the French Revolution, wrote that “Jacobinism and Bolshevism are both dictatorships, born of civil and foreign war; two class dictatorships operating by the same methods: terror, requisition, and taxes, and proposing as a final outcome the same goal, the transformation of society. And not only of Russian or French society, but of universal society.”15

Indeed, Lenin “remained an impenitent ‘Jacobin’ of the proletariat, with an unreserved admiration for the ‘great French Revolution whose vitality and powerful influence on humanity is demonstrated by the wild hatred which it still provokes,’” according to Souvarine. Of course, being “haunted by the French national tradition of 1793,” when the French Revolution radicalized, was not unique to Lenin. At the time of the Bolshevik-Menshevik split in 1903–4, Lenin had been accused of “Jacobinism”—by which was meant (according to one prominent Menshevik, Julius Martov) a “dictatorship by a revolutionary minority” and (according to another prominent Menshevik, Theodore Dan) “a terrorist minority dictatorship.”16 Among Marxists of the time, however, the term generally had a more expansive and complex meaning—and it comes across, for example, if we skim through the writings of Rosa Luxemburg. Although Jacobins were definitely not socialist (and existed before the crystallization of the modern proletariat), she projected them in extremely positive terms:

[The Jacobins] ardently wished for the complete economic liberation of the people. They sincerely sought to realize the formal equality of all before the law, but also real economic equality. All their speeches and their acts were based on an idea: in the democratic republic, there should be neither wealthy people nor the poor; the democratic republic, that is to say a free country based on popular sovereignty, could not long survive if the people, sovereign politically, found themselves economically dependent on and dominated by the wealthy. . . .

As long as the Mountain [another word for Jacobins] held power, they sought salvation in coercive economic terms, in particular to prevent the people of Paris from dying of hunger.17

Twenty-five years later, she would write:

And what happened in the Great French Revolution? Here, after four years of struggle, the seizure of power by the Jacobins proved to be the only means of saving the conquests of the revolution, of achieving a republic, of organizing a revolutionary defense against inner as well as outer foes, of suppressing the conspiracies of counter-revolution and spreading the revolutionary wave from France to all Europe.18

At the same time, she critically characterized the emergency dictatorship established by Robespierre as “a clique affair” and “a dictatorship of a handful of politicians, that is a dictatorship in the bourgeois sense.”19 Nonetheless, she also wrote: “After the fall of the Jacobins, when [Jacobin leader] Robespierre was driven in chains to the place of execution the naked whores of the victory-drunk bourgeoisie danced in the streets, danced a shameless dance of joy around the fallen hero of the revolution.”20

In the polemics of 1904, Lenin therefore embraced the accusation of “Jacobinism”—he portrayed the Bolsheviks as the “Jacobins of Social-Democracy,” while comparing his Menshevik adversaries to the moderate faction of the French Revolution, the Girondins, “inconsistent, wavering, opportunist champions of the cause.” He proclaimed: “A Jacobin who wholly identifies himself with the organization of the proletariat—a proletariat conscious of its class interests—is a revolutionary Social-Democrat.”21 As Souvarine later observed, “This definition provided food for controversy for a long time, and that beyond the national field.” Rosa Luxemburg, George Plekhanov, Julius Martov, Leon Trotsky, Karl Kautsky, and others “rushed to inform Lenin that the Jacobins were bourgeois revolutionaries whose organization was no model for Social Democracy,” as Lars Lih has put it.22 And yet, as we have seen, some of his critics could themselves be targets of their own objections. Certainly Plekhanov had gone further than Luxemburg in explicit acceptance of the most authoritarian elements of Jacobinism in 1903:

Every given democratic principle should be examined not on its own merits in the abstract, but in its bearing on what may be called the basic principle of democracy, namely, on the principle that says Salus populi suprema lex [the welfare of the people is the highest law]. Translated into the language of the revolutionary, this means that the success of the revolution is the highest law. . . . If it were necessary for the success of the revolution to restrict the effect of one or another democratic principle, it would be criminal to hesitate at such a restriction. . . . If, on an impulse of revolutionary enthusiasm, the people were to elect a very good parliament . . . we should try and make it a long parliament; and if the elections turned out to be unfavorable we should try and dismiss it not in two years’ time but if possible in two weeks.23

In the early 1900s, Kautsky, too, urged the workers’ movement to emulate the Jacobin tradition and reject Girondin moderation.24

It is important to recognize the diverse threads of Jacobinism—those associated with the unyielding commitment to revolutionary-democratic goals and ideals, and to inspiring popular mobilizations, as well as those (grounded in the same ideals) associated with emergency dictatorship, authoritarian measures, and the use of violence and terror. Historian Arno J. Mayer has usefully elaborated on this aspect of the Jacobin tradition:

The establishment and operation of the reign of terror was inseparable from the tangled contingencies of civil war, foreign hostility, economic disorganization, and social dislocation, which called for quick, centralizing and coercive action. The ensuing forced-draft political, military, and economic mobilization and deployment were backed by an enforcement terror, complete with rhetorical intimidation, arbitrary arrests, quasi-legal summary justice, and mass execution. To be effective, the regime of revolutionary terror had to rule by patent fear, which often escaped control.25

Lenin—no less than Plekhanov, Trotsky, and Luxemburg—was aware of all aspects of Jacobinism and yet (certainly no less than his critics, when they were not polemicizing against him) continued to identify with the Jacobin tradition. “To make a bogey of Jacobinism in time of revolution is a cheap trick,” he insisted, quoting from Marx himself: “The Reign of Terror of 1793 was nothing but a plebeian manner of settling accounts with absolutism and counter-revolution.” Lenin added: “We, too, prefer to settle accounts with the Russian autocracy by ‘plebeian’ methods and leave Girondist methods to [the Menshevik-controlled] Iskra.” In the same period he hailed the Jacobins as “the most consistent of all bourgeois democrats,” and drew attention to 1850 writings of Marx and Engels, pointing to the Jacobin example as a model for the development of strategy and the creation of a revolutionary workers’ government.26

In June 1917, as Russia was rapidly approaching its second revolution, Lenin gave powerful stress to the Jacobin elements of popular mobilization for revolutionary-democratic goals:

The Jacobins of 1793 belonged to the most revolutionary class of the eighteenth century, the town and country poor. It was against this class, which had in fact (and not just in words) done away with its monarch, its landowners and its moderate bourgeoisie by the most revolutionary measures, including the guillotine—against this truly revolutionary class of the eighteenth century—that the monarchs of Europe combined to wage war.

The Jacobins proclaimed enemies of the people those “promoting the schemes of the allied tyrants directed against the Republic.”

The Jacobins’ example is instructive. It has not become obsolete to this day, except that it must be applied to the revolutionary class of the twentieth century, to the workers and semi-proletarians. To this class, the enemies of the people in the twentieth century are not the monarchs, but the landowners and capitalists as a class.

If the “Jacobins” of the twentieth century, the workers and semi-proletarians, assumed power, they would proclaim enemies of the people the capitalists who are making thousands of millions in profits from the imperialist war, that is, a war for the division of capitalist spoils and profits.

The “Jacobins” of the twentieth century would not guillotine the capitalists—
to follow a good example does not mean copying it. It would be enough to arrest fifty to a hundred financial magnates and bigwigs, the chief knights of embezzlement and of robbery by the banks. It would be enough to arrest them for a few weeks to expose their frauds and show all exploited people “who needs the war.” Upon exposing the frauds of the banking barons, we could release them, placing the banks, the capitalist syndicates, and all the contractors “working” for the government under workers’ control.

The Jacobins of 1793 have gone down in history for their great example of a truly revolutionary struggle against the class of the exploiters of the working people and the oppressed who had taken all state power into their own hands.27

The naïveté of this optimistic scenario matches the observation of Arno Mayer that Lenin and the Bolsheviks—despite the realistic intuition that there would be immense difficulties—were not really prepared for the tidal wave of violence that would be unleashed by the October/November revolution. As we will see, this contributed powerfully to the recessive element in the Jacobin tradition becoming dominant in revolutionary Russia. Yet it was not only these tidal waves of unanticipated difficulties that swept Lenin to the problematical side of Jacobinism. Also drawing the authoritarian element to the fore were complications associated with another theoretical knot associated with Lenin’s conceptualizations of state capitalism.

State-Capitalist Conundrums

There is more than one tangle in this theoretical knot, not necessarily having to do with a flaw in the conceptualizations so much as what these conceptualizations implied regarding the question of democracy. Readers should note that we are referring to plural conceptualizations of state capitalism—one had been articulated by Lenin’s comrade Nikolai Bukharin and two others are associated with Lenin. While Bukharin’s actually seems to be in harmony with the revolutionary-democratic orientation of Bolshevism up through 1918, both of Lenin’s formulations seem to pose serious challenges to the old orientation.

A merger of politics and economics, according to Bukharin, is what takes place “under the dictatorship of finance capital in its classical, final form,” and this is what he terms state capitalism, dominated by what he calls “the state capitalist trusts”—composed of “monopolistic employers’ associations, combined enterprises, and the penetration of banking into industry.” The “cohesion between the economic and the political organizations of the bourgeoisie” that propels forward what would later come to be known as globalization: “Having ceased to be ‘national’ the commodity market, in fact, merely becomes a world market.” As “economics fuse organizationally with politics” (in part through the dramatic development of militarization), Bukharin sees the development of “a new model of state power . . . , the classical model of an imperialist state.”28

The fusion of economics with politics had dramatic repercussions for the labor movement, according to Bukharin, which was highlighted by the capitulation of much of the Socialist International to the “all-embracing bourgeois state” with the coming of the First World War: “The treachery of the socialist parties and trade unions was expressed in the fact that they entered the service of the bourgeois state, that they were in fact stratified by this imperialist state and reduced to ‘workers’ departments’ in the military machine.” No less significant was the development of global alliances and institutions—what Bukharin refers to as “state ‘coalitions’ and the ‘League of Nations.’”

According to Bukharin, the high degree of economic-political interpenetration and merger, the advance of collectivized and interdependent enterprises, the accelerated globalization are “empirical proof of the ‘possibility’ of building communism,” although this must—as he puts it—be brought about as a process of “state capitalism in reverse, its own dialectical transformation into its own antithesis.” The dictatorship of finance capitalism must give way “in the clamor of class struggles” to proletarian rule with “the soviets, the trade unions, the working-class party in power, factory and works’ committees and special economic organizations set up after the seizure of power, with a fairly numerous cadre of organizationally and technically skilled workers.” He concludes: “Thus the system of state capitalism is dialectically transformed into its own antithesis, the state structure of workers; socialism.”29

The “state capitalism” theorized by Lenin (to Bukharin’s initial exasperation) refers to the nature of the economy that must be overseen after the proletarian revolution and the establishment of working-class rule. Far from being something that is “transformed into its own antithesis,” Lenin sees state capitalism as something that must be established and built up by the proletarian state. The fusion of economics and politics he envisions, however, seems to have two somewhat different articulations.

One Leninist articulation, according to E. H. Carr, involves the mixed-economy approach to which we have already given attention: “a regime which would leave owners in possession and management of their industrial enterprises while subjecting them to general state supervision,” with watchful although relatively moderate workers’ control.30 We have already noted how this tends to collide with the inclinations and aspirations of workers who want to move forward—more rapidly than they are able, if their enterprises are to remain viable—to remove their capitalist exploiters and operate the workplaces under their own management, sharing among themselves the profits produced by their labor.

This impulse of expanding workers’ power, which played such an important role in the insurgent mobilizations culminating in the October/November seizure of power, generated new problems, as we have noted, but none was more serious than the decentralizing generation of centrifugal forces to which Carr gives special stress:

Socialism did not seek to subordinate the irresponsible capitalist entrepreneur to an equally irresponsible factory committee claiming the same right of independence of the actual authority; that could only perpetuate the “anarchy of production” which Marx had regarded as the damning stigma of capitalism. The fatal and inevitable tendency of factory committees was to take decisions in the light of the interests of the workers in a particular factory or in a particular region. The essence of socialism was to establish an economy planned and carefully coordinated by a central authority in the common interest of all.31

This problem flows into the other Leninist articulation, emphasized by Lars Lih—“state capitalism . . . as a necessary historical stage,” in which a proletarian state includes “absolutely everything within the sphere of state regulation.” As Lenin suggested on the eve of the October/November revolution, “Socialism is nothing more than the very next step forward from state-monopoly capitalism. In other words: socialism is nothing other than state-monopoly capitalism that is made to serve the whole people and to that extent ceases to be a capitalist monopoly.” Shortly after the revolution, Lenin was arguing that the Soviet regime now faced the “organizational task” of compelling “the most strict and universal registration and monitoring” and of creating “an extremely complicated and subtle network of new organizational relations, embracing the systematic production and distribution of products necessary for the existence of tens of millions of people.” This variant of state capitalism moved in the right direction (both for immediate survival and for eventual socialism) because it was “something centralized, something allowing for calculation and monitoring, something socialized, and that is exactly what we lack, [for] we are threatened by the atmosphere of petty-bourgeois sloppiness.”32

Lih gives particular stress to the profound urgency of the accounting and monitoring aspect of this second variant. Consider, first, his apt description of Russian realities on the eve of the Bolshevik seizure of power:

In the fall of 1917 the chain reaction of social disintegration led to a series of explosions—in the countryside on the front lines, and in the capital cities. In the area of food supply the event that lit the fuse was the doubling of fixed prices at the end of August. Generally overlooked amid the high political drama of those days, the decision to double the prices paid to grain producers was not only a signal of the imminent collapse of food supply; it destroyed the morale of the existing political class [clustered around Kerensky’s Provisional Government] while confirming the political formula of the Bolshevik political contenders.33

After the Bolshevik contenders took power, however, the economic crisis by no means evaporated. The crisis continued to deepen. When preparing to take power, “the Bolsheviks had hoped, or at least had promised, that democratic soviets would provide a basis for a vigorous central authority that could overcome the food-supply crisis”, but optimism turned to desperation with “their failure to get grain from the population still under their control” to the war-torn rural areas,” with local “separatism” having increasingly devastating impacts on the overall economy, and centrifugal forces by no means being overcome by a flourishing soviet democracy. As one Bolshevik food-supply official sourly commented: “They say that the voice of the people is the voice of God. We harkened to the voice of the people, . . . but what came of it? The most pathetic results possible.”34

Such realities had a powerful impact on the way Lenin tended to theorize state capitalism in this period. It is instructive to follow his logic in a report delivered April 29, 1918. “Reality tells us that state capitalism would be a step forward,” he insisted. “If in a small space of time we could achieve state capitalism in Russia, it would be a victory.” Commenting that “the chief enemy is the petty bourgeoisie, its habits and customs, its economic position” (among whom he seemed to include not only small shopkeepers and masses of peasant smallholders but also workers with narrow perspectives), he explained, “To achieve state capitalism at the present time means putting into effect the accounting and control that the capitalist classes carried out.” Over and over Lenin stressed that “only the development of state capitalism, only the painstaking establishment of accounting and control, only the strictest organization and labor discipline, will lead us to socialism.” He polemicized against Left Communist critics: “When they tell us that the introduction of labor discipline coupled with restoring capitalists as leaders is a threat to the revolution, I say: it is just the socialist character of our revolution that these people have failed to understand, they repeat the very thing that easily unites them with the petty bourgeois, who fear discipline, organization, accounting and control as the devil fears holy water.” Arguing that “the tasks of socialist construction demand stubborn, long-continued work and appropriate knowledge, of which we do not have enough,” he insisted that “even the more developed generation of the immediate future will hardly achieve the complete transition to socialism.” Lenin seems to have sensed divergent moods and inclinations within the working class. On the one hand he argued: “When I express my dissent to those people who claim to be socialists and who promise the workers they shall enjoy as much as they like and whatever they like, I say that communism presupposes a productivity of labor that we do not have at present. Our productivity is too low, that is a fact.” On the other hand, he insisted that “the proletariat, which learned discipline from large-scale production, knows that there cannot be socialism until production is organized on a large scale and until there is even stricter discipline.”35

Both aspects of Lenin’s state-capitalism—the mixed-economy variant and the centrally organized variant—suggest the inadequacy of the genuinely, radically democratic perspectives of 1917 Bolshevism. A majority of the workers as well as a majority of the vast peasantry could not have been expected to have a clear understanding of “the big picture”—whether of the immediate needs of the entire society or of the rational pathway that had to be followed if socialism was to be achieved. Such an understanding of “the big picture” could only have been developed by a central political-economic authority that oversaw the processes involved in monitoring and meeting the urgent needs of the entire population while simultaneously overseeing the process involved in realistically and practically overseeing the transition to socialism. On the other hand, a question can be raised regarding the ability of this central authority to understand what was needed and also its ability to ensure that what needed to be done was actually done.

Before the end of 1918, the mixed-economy variant of Lenin’s state-
capitalist conceptualization collapsed, but the monitoring and accounting variant (without the “state-capitalist” label) remained more important than ever. Yet the problematical aspects of implementing this variant hardly disappeared, as we shall see later in this study.

Beyond the Mixed Economy

It is important to recall the point made by Adolfo Gilly—an economy half devoted to the logic of capitalist accumulation and half devoted to the logic running counter to that is an absurdity. This tension is inherent even in the unique variant of the mixed economy that existed in Bolshevik Russia. Yet the implementation of more “radical” economic policies cannot be expected to resolve the problem. The transition from mixed economy to what was called “war communism” dramatically illustrated this fact.

The early orientation of Lenin and Trotsky—a mixed economy under the general control of a workers’ state—collapsed within eight months. There were three primary factors that brought this about: the mass radicalization among the workers combined with confusion over the meaning of workers’ control; the onset of civil war and foreign invasion; and the growing tendency among Russian capitalists to sabotage, de-capitalize, or simply abandon their enterprises.

Stephen Cohen has noted, in his biography of Bukharin, that there was considerable confusion over the term workers’ control: “Did it mean management by factory committees, local soviets, trade unions, the Supreme Economic Council, or merely a ‘workers’ state’?” In fact, it was not clear that workers’ control would involve managing the factories through any organizational form at all, as we shall see. “There were almost as many Bolshevik opinions as possibilities, and Bukharin himself seemed to hold different ones on different occasions,” Cohen recounts. “Knowingly or not, for example, he had adumbrated the eventual statist solution as early as October 1917, when he defined workers’ control as meaning that ‘state power is in the hands of another class,’ the proletariat.” Lenin’s view of workers’ control, as we’ve seen, did not involve the introduction of socialism or nationalizations. “Such measures as the nationalization of the land,” he wrote, “of all the banks and capitalist syndicates, or, at least, the immediate establishment of the control of the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies, etc., over them—measures which do not in any way constitute the ‘introduction’ of socialism—must be absolutely insisted on, and whenever possible, carried out in a revolutionary way.” Control, according to this perspective, precedes nationalizations. Nor did Lenin see workers’ control as involving the workers in actually operating or managing the enterprise. His definition is clarified in his comment that “workers’ control can become a national, all-embracing, omnipresent, extremely precise and extremely scrupulous accounting of the production and distribution of goods.”36

S. A. Smith has criticized Lenin as being, in 1917, “intoxicated by the spectacle of workers, soldiers and peasants taking power into their own hands, and profoundly optimistic about the potential inherent in such self-activity.” Smith complains: “It cannot be said that Lenin satisfactorily theorized the relationship between grass-roots workers’ control of production and state-wide regulation of the economy.” In a sense, however, Lenin did theorize a conception of workers’ control that fused grassroots control with statewide regulation of the economy. The key was the soviet system, a pyramid of democratic councils—from local to regional to national levels—in which delegates were subject to recall by those who elected them. These were to be the basis of the workers’ state that would provide overall coordination of the economy. The factory committees within each workplace were to keep track of how the capitalist owners and managers were running things, preventing irresponsible activity and helping to train workers to assume an increasingly conscious role in the productive process. The trade unions were to defend the rights of workers on the job as well as help shape wage policies and the workers’ contribution to industrial productivity. Gradually, private ownership would give way to public ownership, and capitalists would be replaced by managers and answerable to the soviet state, the democratic government of the working class, with the checks and balances of workers’ input and safeguards remaining in place through factory committees and trade unions.

It can be argued that there wasn’t sufficient theorization here, but it isn’t clear that any theorization would have been sufficient given the economic calamity that was unfolding. In any event, as Smith observes, “Lenin never developed a conception of workers’ self-management. Even after October [i.e., the Bolshevik victory], workers’ control remained for him fundamentally a matter of ‘inspection’ and ‘accounting.’” Smith argues that in the period leading up to the revolution, “the Bolshevik formula of ‘workers’ control of production and distribution’ was the one most widely supported by workers in Petrograd.” Contrary to some accounts, the mainstream Bolshevik demand was not to nationalize industry with workers managing the factories, but rather to prevent the capitalists from sabotaging the economy and overturning the gains of the workers. “‘Sabotage’ and ‘saboteur’ were key words in popular discourse during the revolution and Bolsheviks in the factory committees harped constantly on this theme,” Smith points out. “It was the willingness of the Bolsheviks to fight ‘sabotage,’ in order to protect jobs and the democratic gains of the February Revolution, which was the secret of their rapidly growing popularity in the summer and autumn of 1917.” When workers actually took over factories, they often tended to see this as a temporary measure to forestall closure of the factory by greedy or hostile owners.37

By the spring of 1918, 40 enterprises in Petrograd had been nationalized, 61 were being temporarily run by factory committees, 207 were under workers’ control, and 402 were still being run by their owners. Those in this last category were mainly small workshops, while most of the city’s major factories were among the 207 under workers’ control. Workers’ control meant that within the factory the capitalist management existed alongside the factory committee, but the management’s orders could not be effective without ratification by the factory committee or its control commission. The organ of workers’ control would oversee the execution of various jobs to be done, also investigating the state of equipment, finances, order books, accounts, fuel, and raw material. In addition, it assumed responsibility for working conditions, productivity, internal order, and laying off workers. The capitalists resented these incursions into the traditional prerogatives of management. Shortly after the Bolsheviks took power, the Society of Factory and Works Owners in Petrograd denounced “non-state, class control by workers over the country’s industrial life (as decreed by the government) since it does not, in practice, pursue national ends and is not recognized by the majority of the Russian people.” Unofficially, this organization of Petrograd’s major industrial and commercial firms inclined toward closing up business rather than giving in to demands for workers’ control, because “the government, by completely handing over management of the factories into the hands of the working class is erecting a barrier to the further participation of capital in industrial life.” Yet it was quickly concluded by many that such intransigence was not prudent. “Facing bodies of united workmen,” E. A. Ross recounted in 1918, “sometimes with, but often without, the support of their office force, the managers of Russian establishments had to dispense with their familiar means of exploitation and content themselves with what they could get by tact, argument, and personal influence.”38

Workers’ control came to mean different things in different establishments. Ross interviewed two Moscow manufacturers and discovered divergent experiences. “The cotton-mill man threw up his hands. No getting on with the factory committee; they wouldn’t let him fire the good-for-nothing fellows. Production was way down,” Ross recounted. “The machine-shop man, on the other hand, had no trouble. When he saw the committee about discharging a certain fellow, he stated his case to them in language they could understand, got them to put themselves in his place. He found them always reasonable.”39

Ross described yet other experiences: “Taking too literally ‘the right of labor to the whole produce,’ workers have ridden their manager out of the works in a wheel-barrow, only to implore him a few weeks later to come back because they knew not where to buy raw material or what kinds to order. One manager held out till he was let back with complete control of hiring and firing.” Ross found in general that Russian capitalists and bourgeois economists agreed that “while the principles upon which state-managed industry may succeed are known, one cannot expect such principles to be followed by a government resting immediately on the Russian proletariat.” He predicted that the popular pressures rising from this situation would “therefore result simply in the eventual disappearance of the capital.”40

We have seen that Lenin and Trotsky sought to avoid such disappearance of capital. Russia was not ready for socialism. But this ran counter to a growing mood of extreme radicalism. A Menshevik observer commented in early 1918 that “the majority of the proletariat, particularly in Petrograd, looks on workers’ control as an entry into the kingdom of socialism.” Left Communists pushed for “the complete removal of capitalist and feudal survivals in the relations of production”; they warned that true power to the working class would not be achieved by some “proletarian elite which will sit with the capitalist elite on the boards of the [factory] trusts.” Such state capitalism, despite Lenin’s defense, was attacked with the argument that “a proletarian-peasant dictatorship which does not entail the expropriation of the expropriators [i.e., of the capitalists], which does not eliminate the power of capital in the mines and factories can only be a temporary phenomenon.” This orientation was not restricted to a party faction. “The process of nationalization went on from below,” one Bolshevik later explained, “and the soviet leaders could not keep up with it, could not take things in hand, in spite of the fact that many orders were issued which forbade local organizations to enact nationalizations by themselves.”41

Yet it is not the case that this radical wave simply overwhelmed all in its path. There was an ongoing struggle among Bolsheviks and also within the working class. Journalist-historian William Henry Chamberlin aptly describes the stubborn orientation of Lenin and his closest co-thinkers: “When workers’ delegations came to him asking for the nationalization of their factories, Lenin at this time was in the habit of putting embarrassing questions to them. Did they know accurately what their factories produced, or what markets could be found for their products? Were they prepared to operate the factory efficiently if the state placed it in their hands?” Under such questioning, some workers’ delegations had second thoughts. “If they could not answer these questions satisfactorily Lenin would recommend that they make haste slowly and consent to an arrangement under which the capitalist would have a share in the management of the factory and would provide technical knowledge and experience for its operation.”42

Up to a point, such an approach was effective. “If, after all, capital fared not so badly,” reflected Ross, “it was only owing to the amazing reasonableness of the Russian masses when they were not under the spell of the crowd. . . . There is no doubt that the Russian, even the illiterate working-man, is one of the most reasonable beings on earth if someone he trusts approaches him in the right way and has patience.” On the other hand, the economic crisis in war-torn Russia that we have noted (and which had helped bring about the revolution) guaranteed deepening discontent. The combination of this with genuine workers’ democracy helped to generate a volatile situation. Ross commented that “the ease of recalling one factory committee and setting up another puts reason at a constant disadvantage.” Quite aside from the question of whether to allow the capitalist to own and manage enterprises, there was the question of the extent to which workers would allow themselves to be exploited, and the extent to which the capitalists and their underlings would be permitted to impose discipline. “After an experience of being rolled out of the works in a wheel-barrow, the foremen were pretty limp and said nothing.” Productivity fell by 30 to 70 percent. Ross reported: “The labor men I interviewed frankly admitted the great slump in productivity, but insisted labor should not bear all the blame. Part of it was due to the gradual deterioration of the machinery and to the growing difficulty of obtaining a steady supply of raw materials.” There were also instances of sabotage by employers desiring a shutdown of operations in order to “bring labor to its senses.”43

Regardless of the causes of declining productivity (and hence profitability), the indisputable fact of the decline, and the ongoing uncertainty over the future, rapidly ate away at the patience of the business community with this state of affairs. A polarization began to undermine the policies that Lenin sought to advance. Chris Goodey’s richly analytical sketch, coinciding with what is described in Ross’s account, stresses that “wildcat ‘spontaneous’ nationalizations” carried out by some workers proved to “undermine the basis of the negotiations going on between Lenin and Trotsky and Western representatives for financial and technical assistance.” It also undermined the basis of the compromise that the Bolshevik leaders sought with Russian capitalists. The workers’ defiance, according to Goodey, “ensures that the Western representatives will not be enticed into real negotiations, that the capitalist countries will invade, that the civil war will start in earnest, that the proletariat will virtually have disappeared by 1920,” thanks to the disintegration of the economy.44

Many capitalists—by the spring and summer of 1918 placing their hopes in civil war and foreign invasion—did what they could to facilitate the disintegration of the economy. The incursion of German military forces before the signing of the Brest-Litovsk treaty in March 1918 was followed by the invasion of Allied troops afterward, and French, British, and US support made possible the effective mobilization of indigenous Russian forces by Admiral Kolchak, General Denikin, and others to wage a civil war designed to overturn the Soviet Republic. This encouraged many factory owners who, as Victor Serge observed, “liquidated their stocks, stole or sold their equipment, and vanished with the cash they had realized.” While some capitalists might have pragmatically desired to compromise with the Soviet regime, the new dangers escalated the working-class militancy and swept away the moderation of the Bolshevik mainstream. “In June,” Ross wrote, “when it had become apparent that the Allies intended to bayonet to death the Soviet regime, general nationalization was prescribed on the ground that in war-time factories had better be in the hands of men loyal if not always competent than in the hands of disgruntled owners, most of whom would practice sabotage on the plant if thereby they might help the cause of the Whites [i.e, counterrevolutionaries].”45

The impact of this shift to what came to be called “war communism” was to be profound. All of the reasons for resisting it—unfortunately—were sound. The shift brought about economic chaos and, in a twist of irony, gravely undermined the power of the workers. In April there was one nationalization measure, 7 in May, but an average of 170 a month from July to October. Although in June only 357 enterprises in total had been nationalized, the figure stood at 860 in September, including entire industries—mining, transport, electricity, oil, rubber, sugar, etc. “This expropriation of industry, verging ever closer to total nationalization,” wrote Victor Serge, “placed an increasingly numerous population of workers within the responsibility of the Socialist State, and compelled it hastily to establish a body of functionaries, managers and administrators who could not be recruited straight away from among the working class. The bureaucracy was born, and was rapidly becoming a threat.” From 1918 to 1919, the government apparatus had grown from 114,539 to 529,841. In roughly the same period the Bolshevik organization, renamed the Communist Party, grew from 115,000 to 251,000. “The functionaries were thus far more numerous than the party membership,” Serge noted, “and they infiltrated into the ranks of the party.”46 This was accompanied by the collapse of the economy, the spread of famine, the brutalizing Civil War, which all combined to make war communism a devastating and authoritarian experience, suffused with a desperate heroism and commitment to revolutionary ideals, but no less tragic for all that.

Here we can offer only a few indications of the dimensions of the economic disaster. “Such a decline in the productive forces not of a little community, but of an enormous society of a million people . . . is unprecedented in the history of humanity,” according to Bolshevik economist and historian Leonid Kritsman. Alexei Rykov, the Bolshevik president of the Supreme Council of National Economy, reported that from 1918 to 1919 the number of nationalized factories and works rose from 1,125 to about 4,000, which constituted the bulk of the industrial concerns of Soviet Russia, but that by the beginning of 1920 half of these had been forced to close, adding: “The number of operatives is estimated approximately at 1,000,000, which is between one third and one fifth of the numbers of the proletariat in 1914.” Victor Serge reports that “the working class was showing numerous symptoms of exhaustion and demoralization,” which is not surprising given the fact, for example, that the purchase of food in late 1918 absorbed seven-tenths of the workers’ earnings, compared with the previous norm of half. The portion of workers’ income separate from their wage earnings had risen from 3.5 percent in 1913 to 38 percent in 1918. “What were the sources of these extras? Simply theft from factories and warehouses.” Serge added that the working class’s “best sons had left its ranks for the front line or for work in Soviet institutions,” and that “famine was forcing it close to the peasants,” the class from which many workers had originally come, with many returning to the countryside in search of food. “Production was very low, and the factories lived as best they could, idle more than half the time, and riddled with theft. Raw materials and fuel were lacking and discipline practically non-existent.” The stark decline in production is clear in the following figures, given in millions of poods (1 pood = 36.113 pounds): from 1913 to 1918, coal production fell from 1,738 to 731; iron ore, from 57,887 to 1,686; cast iron, from 256 to 31.5; steel, from 259 to 24.5; rails, from 39.4 to 1.1. An index measuring industrial and agricultural production indicates that the former fell by 70 percent, the latter by 40 percent. In Moscow, 1913 saw 23.1 deaths per thousand people, while 1919 saw 45.4 per thousand. The transportation system, vital to any economy, was in shambles—60 percent of the country’s railway engines were in need of repair; productivity in transport had fallen by at least 50 percent while running costs had increased by 150 percent. All of this is aside from (but not unrelated to) the millions of people who perished in the famine.47

Eyewitness Arthur Ransome, a sympathetic correspondent from the Manchester Guardian, gave a vivid sense of how the food crisis affected Moscow—particularly in relation to how he was able to eat. He was given a ticket that allowed him to secure his first meal in one of the National Kitchens (replacing private restaurants) that had been set up throughout the city. “The dinner consisted of a plate of soup, and a very small portion of something else,” he observed. After he secured a room in a modest hotel, he soon received a card that entitled him to purchase (for a modest amount) one—and only one—dinner daily, between 2:00 and 7:00 p.m., which was “a plate of very good soup, together with a second course of a scrap of meat or fish. . . . Living hungrily through the morning, at two o’clock I used to experience definite relief in the knowledge that now at any moment I could have my meal.” Periodically, other delicacies such as a pot of jam or a small quantity of Ukrainian sausage were made available for purchase. Addressing the emergence of an illegal black-market system in which food was selling for exorbitant prices, Ransome commented: “It is obvious that abolition of the card system would mean that the rich would have enough and the poor nothing.” A Communist explained to Ransome that the black-market speculation would end when everyone was able to get enough to eat through the card system. “And when will you be able to do that?” The answer: “As soon as the war ends, and we can use our transport for peaceful purposes.” Ransome also chatted with the chambermaid who tidied his room: “I asked her how she liked the new regime. She replied that there was not enough to eat, but that she felt freer.” In an overheard conversation between two workers on the street one night, one said: “If only it were not for the hunger.” The other responded: “But when will that change?”48

In this period, the former Bolshevik Party (now Communist Party) and the emerging political system were altered almost beyond recognition. “The party’s democratic norms of 1917, as well as its almost libertarian and reformist profile of early 1918,” writes Stephen Cohen, “gave way to a ruthless fanaticism, rigid authoritarianism, and pervasive ‘militarization’ of life on every level.49 Much more than party norms gave way. The factory committees, trade unions, and soviets were also transformed. The political pluralism of left-wing parties and currents that had flourished up to June 1918 didn’t survive inside these proletarian institutions. To a large extent, the widely proclaimed “workers’ democracy” slogan became an empty one.

This was not a simple or absolute change, but rather a process that contained contradictions and countervailing tendencies, to which we will give attention in the next chapters. Nor was the rapid elimination of the mixed economy the only causal factor. There was also a civil war, a foreign invasion, and an economic blockade, not to mention a drought plus the loss of rich farmlands and industrial areas to Germany through the Brest-Litovsk treaty. But the premature elimination of the mixed economy was a major factor in creating the disaster that befell the young Soviet Republic.

In much of the discussion of nationalizations and workers’ control during the early period of Bolshevik rule, many scholars give considerable attention to the question of “democratic control from below” versus “productivist centralization from above.” Under the actual circumstances, the debate seems irrelevant. Maurice Dobb commented that “when a group of workers took over an enterprise . . . they would tend to neglect wider social interests and even to develop a kind of proprietorial feeling of their own,” and sometimes this was accompanied by an alluring utopian-libertarian impulse that undermined workshop discipline and industrial productivity. Lenin’s wife, Krupskaya, recounted a daytime encounter with a woman worker who, when asked what shift she worked, answered: “None of us are working today. We had a meeting yesterday evening, everyone was behind with her domestic work at home, so we voted to knock off today. We’re the bosses now, you know.” Even for more disciplined, politically conscious workers, there were serious problems. Under the management of local factory committees, made up of well-meaning but managerially inexperienced workers, the enterprises “were frequently cut off from their former markets and sources of supply,” with the result that “the ordinary links between economic units were largely broken down,” and the idea of a democratically planned economy was translated into a reality of dreadful chaos. But a top-down approach of central planning provided no solution. “The attempt to nationalize everything from locomotive works to public baths,” wrote William Henry Chamberlin, “and to provision the population through state agencies with everything from bread to mushrooms inevitably led to an enormous, unwieldy and incompetent bureaucracy, which stifled all creative initiative and often led to bungling misuse and neglect of the slender resources which the country possessed.” Here again, as Lenin had warned, there was the woeful lack of knowledge and expertise, what Chamberlin termed “so much inevitable incompetence and mismanagement, as a result of the sudden influx of uneducated and untrained men into the higher posts of state administration.”50 No matter which way we look at it, no matter what our preference—local initiative or central planning or some hypothetical synthesis—the rapid nationalization of the economy spelled disaster.

One can argue that, under the circumstances, the Bolsheviks had no choice. Unfortunately, sometimes the Bolsheviks themselves did not acknowledge that this was a painful but necessary expedient. “Everything was swept along in a turbulent current, flooded with revolutionary enthusiasm,” Bolshevik minister of culture Anatoly Lunacharsky later recalled. “It was necessary above all to give full voice to our ideals and ruthlessly crush whatever did not accord with them. It was difficult to speak about half measures then, about stages, about approaching our ideal step by step. That was taken to be opportunism, even by the most ‘cautious.”51 Victor Serge wrote:

The social system in these years was later called “War Communism.” At the time it was called simply “Communism,” and anyone who, like myself, went so far as to consider it purely temporary was looked upon with disdain. Trotsky had just written that this system would last over several decades if the transition to a genuine, unfettered Socialism was to be assured. Bukharin was writing his work on The Economy in the Period of Transition, whose schematic Marxism aroused Lenin’s ire. He considered the present mode of organization to be final. And yet, all the time it was becoming simply impossible to live within it: impossible, not of course for the administrators, but for the mass of the population.52

Looking back on this period, Lenin self-critically commented: “In estimating the prospects of development we in most cases—I can scarcely recall an exception—started out with an assumption, perhaps not always openly expressed but always tacitly implied, that we would be able to proceed straight away with socialist construction. . . . We assumed that we could proceed straight to socialism without a preliminary period in which the old economy would be adapted to socialist economy.” These comments were made to explain the abandonment of war communism in favor of what came to be called the New Economic Policy (NEP). Dobb described NEP as aiming “to re-establish the proper relationship between the State and its environment which had been rudely broken in June 1918 by the needs of civil war,” adding that it “was only new so far as it represented a return to peace after three years of war. It was a return to the path which had been trodden in the spring of 1918.”53 There’s an element of truth here, yet Dobb’s point is profoundly misleading. There could be no going back. Too much had been destroyed, too many had been killed or horribly injured, too many patterns and policies and precedents had been established. The world, the Russian working class, the Soviet Republic, the Bolsheviks themselves—all had been transformed. Certain possibilities had been eliminated, and qualitatively new problems had been created to confront the revolutionaries—especially problems that they had helped to create, such as the premature socialization of the economy.

The destruction of the mixed economy in 1918 was a disaster. This was matched only by the disaster of Bolshevik Russia’s isolation resulting from the failure of socialist revolutions in other countries (especially those that were industrially advanced, such as Germany). Taken together, these two calamities—isolation and premature economic “radicalization”—would be, along with the militarism generated by foreign invasion and brutal civil war, the primary causes of the Soviet Republic becoming a dictatorship in the narrow sense of the word.

This dictatorship would persist even with the return to a variant of the mixed economy represented by the implementation of the New Economic Policy.

Workers, Peasants, Cadres

In early 1921, William Z. Foster—a sharp-eyed syndicalist and famed US strike leader seeking a new and more profound meaning for his life—went to Soviet Russia. When he returned to the United States, making his way into the new Communist movement, he sought to employ his perceptions and sensibilities into The Russian Revolution, a thick pamphlet issued by the Trade Union Educational League. Included in the pamphlet are related but contradictory narratives reflecting the reality with which he engaged in his journey of discovery.54

“The present government of Russia is what the Communists term a dictatorship of the proletariat,” he wrote. “This means that the workers have become the ruling class in Russia, and the intention is that they shall remain such, until, through the operations of the new Communist institutions, social class lines are wiped out by all the people physically fit becoming actual producers.” Foster went on, deeper in the pamphlet, to define that dramatic term in a quite different way—going beyond the theoretical construct to describe more of what he actually saw:

The dictatorship of the proletariat, as expressed by the small, strongly organized Communist Party, came into existence because of the general unpreparedness of the masses. Since the various social institutions, made up in the main of these knowing elements, could not function spontaneously in a revolutionary manner, the Communist minorities in them felt compelled to find a way, through organization, discipline, and militancy, to make them do so.55

Foster emphasized that the Communist dictatorship was temporary: the elimination of “ignorance and general social backwardness” would make “the dictatorship gradually disappear,” and in time the ultimate Communist goal of “a non-government society would be arrived at.” While political parties of “the capitalists, aristocrats, and their many hangers-on” were “outlaws,” he recorded milder treatment toward what he termed “proletarian parties,” among whom he counted the Left-Socialist Revolutionaries, the Mensheviks, and the anarchists. They had been subjected to restrictions and, in some cases, outright repression. “No one deplores more than the Communists this rigid suppression of the opposition, especially honest working class opposition,” he wrote. “But it is a supreme necessity of the revolution, something without which the latter could not survive.” This was because of the life-and-death struggle against the counterrevolution. “Organized opposition to the Government is forbidden, but individuals talk as freely as in any country in the world,” he stressed. “In Russia I heard people criticize the Government more freely than in any country I have ever been in.” He made explicit reference to Menshevik, anarchist, and Socialist Revolutionary delegates at the Moscow Soviet denouncing the mistreatment of some of their comrades in the wake of the Kronstadt rebellion, and a Russian anarchist vigorously polemicizing against Communist policy at a session of the Red Trade Union International.56

This account has layers of significance. It gives a sense of what an experienced labor activist just embracing Communism (a) wanted to believe, (b) was led to believe by early Russian Communists who were introducing him to their country, and (c) was able to believe based on what he observed in the early Soviet Republic. It also highlights (d) what did not come to pass, as well as suggesting (e) what might have been if history had taken different turns.

As we sort through the diverse possibilities and “might-have-beens,” as well as divergent and contradictory trends and interactions in what actually happened within the historical process that was the Russian Revolution, we need to push against turning such categories as “worker” or “peasant” or “cadre” into simplistic abstractions. Actual human beings, when we place them into such categories (which happens as one develops political, social, and historical analyses), can lose their unique individual qualities as they are blended into some collective entity. They can also all too easily be transformed into some romanticized or vilified construct, preventing us from understanding dynamic realities and potentialities.

Michael Haynes has usefully challenged the recent tendency among conservative historians (e.g., Richard Pipes) as well as some more liberal-minded social historians (e.g., Orlando Figes) to return to a variant of the “grey masses” or “dark masses” conceptualization of Russian peasants and workers. Such historians argue that, given the natural violence and brutality of the lower classes, efforts to generate popular mobilizations to establish “rule by the people” inevitably turn into—to quote an old parody lyric sung to the tune of “Battle Hymn of the Republic”—“arson, rape and bloody murder when the Red Revolution comes.” Or as the Russian liberal historian, and leader of the Kadets, Pavel Milyukov, put it: “If the Revolution should come, it will not be so much an uprising as a hateful mutiny. The rabble will be let loose.” Yet as Haynes notes, and Christopher Read documents, this vision of popular mayhem unleashed sometimes comes close to being the opposite of the truth.57

Of course, it is possible to make all kinds of generalizations about the masses. In the late 1920s, Joshua Kunitz contrasted how nineteenth-century writers such as Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, and Nikolai Nekrasov described the peasants with how such writers as Chekov and Gorky described them in the early twentieth century—earlier writers “tended to sentimentalize, idealize, and well-nigh canonize the muzhik [peasant]” as “the store-house of all that was wholesome, religious, and solid in Russia,” while later writers “began to harp on the unmitigated backwardness, ignorance, and brutality of the village, on the utter stupidity, servility, and pettiness of the muzhik.”58 And he showed that the working class could be subjected to sweepingly heroic generalizations by early Soviet writers as well, as with the V. Kirillov poem “We,” written shortly after the October Revolution:

We, the countless, redoubtable legions of Toil,

We’ve conquered vast spaces of oceans and lands,

Illumined great cities with suns of our making,

Fired our souls with proud flames of revolt.

Gone are our tears, our softness forgotten,

We banished the perfume of lilac and grass,

We exalt electricity, steam and explosives,

Motors and sirens and iron and brass. . . .

Our souls fused with metal, part of our engines,

We unlearned to wish for and dream of the sky.

It is here on this earth that we want to be happy,

To feed all the hungry, to hush their long cry. . . .

O poets and aesthetes, curse, curse the great Demos,

Kiss the fragments of yesterday on the soles of its feet,

Shed tears over ruined and shattered old temples,

While the free and the brave a new beauty shall greet.

Our arms, our muscles cry out for vast labors,

The pain of creation glows hot in our breast,

United, we sweeten all life with our honey,

Earth takes a new course at our mighty behest.

We love life, and the turbulent joys that intoxicate,

We are hard, and no anguish our spirit can thaw.

We—all, We—in all, We—hot flames that regenerate,

We ourselves, to ourselves, are God, Judge, and Law.59

Social realities such as social classes—collectivities of human beings, people who happen to be part of one or another class—are more complex and diverse than the poem suggests. One aspect of this complexity is generational. Both those who are politically or socially conservative and those of a more revolutionary bent tend to grow older with the passage of time, and they often find that younger innovators (excited by new challenges and possibilities) see their elders’ accumulated wisdom and insight as being passé, stodgy, irrelevant, or worse.

One aspect of this generational divide is highlighted within the early Soviet regime’s Commissariat of Enlightenment (commonly known by its Russian abbreviation, Narkompros). Heading it was Anatoly Lunacharsky, “a large, untidy man with pince-nez and a benevolent expression,” animated by both poetic and tolerant qualities, excited by experiment and modernism, insistent on openness and diversity, and resistant to the repression of any cultural trends (traditional as well as radical). Narkompros was an incredibly innovative institution, described by Sheila Fitzpatrick as “incoherent, rambling, malfunctioning, over-staffed with middle-aged intellectuals and under-staffed with proletarian Communists.”60 Within Communist ranks, younger comrades advanced sharp organizational and ideological challenges to the “middle-aged intellectual” approach.

Evgraf Litkens and Platon Kerzhentsev are prominent examples of such younger challengers. The leather-jacketed Civil War veteran Litkens was assigned by the Communist Party to the Commissariat of Enlightenment to help make it more efficient. “Military virtues of discipline, organization and tough-mindedness,” as Fitzpatrick puts it, combined in him with the self-presentation “as a hard-headed practical revolutionary, making no concession to sentiment or intellectual self-doubt.” Even more harshly, Kerzhentsev—despite multiple political and diplomatic assignments—was vociferous in his assaults on what he saw as the all-too-tolerant ethos represented by Lunacharsky’s generation. “It has long been time to bring the fantasy of a few of our Communist poets into the strict but necessary limits of Party discipline,” he proclaimed in a direct assault on Lunacharsky in 1920. “Literature for us is a weapon of political education,” he insisted, and if independent writers did not give in to “ideological persuasion,” then “we do not renounce other methods of struggle, such as taking individual plays off the repertory, forbidding the printing of their works, etc.” This approach, which would be triumphant in later years, was taken up by a rising layer of even younger writers, critics, and Party activists dedicated to fighting against “bourgeois attitudes” in the arts and who, as literary historian Marc Slonim puts it, “behaved like contenders in a civil war, transferring its ruthlessness and intransigence to the literary field.” Not only literature, but all of the arts, academic disciplines, and education in general were to be subordinated to this orientation.61

This approach was alien to the dominant trend in the Commissariat of Enlightenment, which was basically shared by Lenin himself, who insisted: “Proletarian culture must be a legitimate development of all reserves of knowledge mankind has accumulated under the pressure of capitalist society, of landlord society, of bureaucrat society.” As Lunacharsky explained, “The laboring masses thirst after education,” and the regime’s responsibility was to offer “schools, books, theatres, and so on” to facilitate “the people themselves, consciously or unconsciously” so that they evolve “their own culture” under their own democratic control. “But the proletariat must draw on the art of the past in order to produce its own.” One of Lunacharsky’s closest associates, belonging to the same revolutionary generation as he, was M. N. Pokrovskii, an experienced academic and fierce partisan of Marxist historiography—but also a partisan of scholarly professionalism. Another was Nadezhda Krupskaya. Immersed in educational efforts from her late teens, she was later central to the organizational functioning of pre-1917 Bolshevism—“observant, shrewd, immune to flattery, suspicious of pretensions.” She was absolutely dedicated to popular education in the spirit of John Dewey and Leo Tolstoy. Krupskaya was six years Lunacharsky’s senior, but her sensibilities and her relationship with Lenin drew the commissar close to her, and he saw her as “the soul of Narkompros.” These three were among the older layer of seasoned, revolutionary Marxist intellectuals. They were resistant to “revolutionary” and “practical” shortcuts to knowledge and culture, which were becoming increasingly fashionable among younger cadres in Communist ranks. Krupskaya “was all for minimizing central authority,” according to biographer Robert McNeal. She also complained: “The teachers are being cross-examined about their beliefs in a most detailed way, which is an inadmissible violation of freedom of conscience.”62

There was yet another generational divide on cultural questions—with challenges posed to classical and traditional creations by the Russian and Soviet avant-garde, such as the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, the theater director Vselovod Meyerhold, artists Alexander Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova, and others who saw what they offered as the true cultural expression of the revolutionary Russia. While appreciative of the avant-garde innovators, Lunacharsky resisted their pressure to grant them a privileged position as the “official” artistic representatives of the Soviet Republic. “He encouraged Communist artists and scholars,” as Fitzpatrick notes, “but not in persecution of their colleagues or bids for monopoly.” It is interesting to consider Lenin’s views as well. His cultural tastes tended to be relatively conservative. As he explained to the seasoned German Communist leader Klara Zetkin (who tended to agree with him): “It is beyond me to consider the products of expressionism, futurism, cubism and other ‘isms’ the highest manifestation of artistic genius. I do not understand them. I experience no joy from them.” But far from seeking to repress them, he said in the next breath: “Yes dear Klara, it can’t be helped. We’re both old fogies. For us it is enough that we remain young and are among the foremost at least in matters concerning the revolution. But we won’t be able to keep pace with the new art; we’ll just have to come trailing behind.” Adding that “our opinion on art is not the important thing,” he emphasized: “Art belongs to the people. . . . For art to get closer to the people and the people to art we must start by raising general educational and cultural standards.”63

The generational divide played out differently, and with interesting variations, below the lofty heights of the Commissariat of Enlightenment.

One finds, of course, a similar dynamic of the older leaders resisting what to them are questionable innovations by the less-experienced younger activists. Kunitz explains how many peasants distinguished between Bolsheviks (who had ended the war and allowed them to take the land from the nobles) and the troublesome Communists: “Bolsheviks . . . were those who stood for peace and the confiscation of land; Communists, those who used new-fangled words, attacked the Orthodox Church, the holy saints, the marriage rites, declared woman the equal of man, hailed the poorest peasant [as opposed to those who prospered] as the salt of the earth.”64 Wendy Goldman quotes a chastushka (popular short song) that articulates this view:

Comrades, your new laws

Are really quite insane,

It’s clear they were devised

By someone without a brain.65

But she also notes that increasing numbers of young peasants—joining the Communist Youth and rebelling against the old ways—sang a variety of their own chastushkas that expressed quite different views. For example, on religion:

God, oh God,

What are you doing?

Instead of working,

The Virgin Mary you’re screwing.66

Also on the status of women:

I no longer fear my husband,

If we can’t cooperate,

I will take myself to court,

And we will separate.67

Sexual freedom:

When I was just a little girl

Mama made me bed at home,

But I bed down in the hay

Now that I am grown.68

The right to choose one’s own marriage partner:

My sweetheart asked me to elope,

But mama scared me so,

Yet even if she hurt me,

I would have to go.

I will elope,

I will make father weep,

I will make father grieve,

I’ll take a cow and a sheep.69

There were a number of influences stirring new thinking within the villages. “The twelve million peasants that Russia sent to forty fronts in the great wars [World War I and the Civil War] brought back to the village the ferment of new ideas—the new viewpoint,” notes an eyewitness report on the villages by Albert Rhys Williams. Another eyewitness, Samuel N. Harper, who conducted a 1926 study visit, reported the development of three important institutions in the villages—the most important and influential was the Village Assembly (the persistent and spontaneously revitalized old mir or obschina); less influential but regime-backed was the village soviet (often inclined to defer to the mir); and supplementing both was the Peasant Society for Mutual Assistance. Initiated by the Communist Party during the famine of 1921, this third entity was initially designed to provide life-giving assistance from regions not affected by the famine to those that were; it later evolved into a broader self-help movement. “When we have Communism the whole state will be an enormous organization of mutual assistance of all mankind,” said the Bolshevik ex-peasant Mikhail Kalinin, serving as the formal president of the Soviet Republic (a more or less figurehead position). “From this point of view the peasant committees of mutual assistance are schools of Communist statecraft for the peasants.” This function entailed playing a broad social service role and increasingly important educational and cultural roles for peasants in the villages, but also assisting the increasing number of peasants who had occasion to travel to the cities. “One of the aims of the societies is to further collectivist practices among the peasants,” explains Harper. The regime also made sure that the Communist youth organization, the Komsomol, “was given a special role of leadership [in these mutual assistance committees] in order to attract the younger element of the peasantry.”70

Karl Borders identified the importance not only of the Komsomol branches in the countryside, but also of the Young Pioneers, modeled on the Scout movement in England and the United States but sporting red kerchiefs and interweaving deeper purposes with the hiking, camping, singing, and marching. “From this early age they are inculcated with the ideas of the Communist state and the continued class struggle.” wrote Borders. “They are taught habits of neatness and cleanliness. They must not smoke. They are expected to help in every local social undertaking which their ages will permit.” An even more active role fell to the somewhat older members of the Komsomol—organizing athletic and cultural activities, to be sure, as well as engaging in social service activities in the community, but also carrying out Communist educational work. They were essentially “protagonists of the soviet regime among the mass of young people.”71 Undoubtedly, such things help explain the proliferation of some of the chastushkas reported by Wendy Goldman.

But there were larger forces at play as well in bringing change to the “changeless village.” Borders wrote: “There can be no doubt whatever that the Revolution tended to break up still further the old moral and social sanctions which throughout the world were disturbed by the [First World] War. The long drawn out War, civil war, blockade and famine of Russia contributed to an uncertainty and terror to life that brought too early maturity to the children who lived through it all.” Some felt the despair expressed by one particular twelve-year-old orphan: “I don’t know what I am going to do now. My life is already ruined.” Some clung tighter than ever to the old ways. Some rebelled violently, destructively, often self-destructively. “There are plenty of people to tell you, from the village priest to perfectly good Communists, that the youth of the country is going to the devil,” said Borders. And yet, as we have seen, some were drawn to the new revolutionary faith.72 Nothing would ever be the same.

Visiting his old village in the early 1920s, after almost two decades, an amazed Maurice Hindus compared his memories of the way things used to be for peasant children with the new stirrings that were beginning to animate small but growing circles of village youth:

The world outside scarcely existed for them. Few, very few, ever saw a newspaper, a book, a magazine. Few, very few, went to school, none to college. They lived like their fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers before them, in filth, poverty, darkness, with no ambition, no hope, no stimulus to animate them, save their one immemorial dream of someday coming into possession of the landlord’s estates. Year after year, generation after generation, the same monotony, the same drudgery, the same dullness. But now? Their imagination had been stirred. They were naïve enough in their outgoing faith in the miraculous power of the Revolution to rid the world forever of want, inequality, sorrow—of all evil and all woe. They knew so little of the perversity of human nature. They gave no thought to forces which some day would bring them no little disillusionment. They were so young and so inexperienced in the ways of man and the world. But their minds teemed with new concepts, new ideas, new beliefs. They were aware of a world outside of their village. They were awake to the darkness around them and to the need of ushering in enlightenment.73

The generational divide is suggested in the shifting attitudes in the village toward the practice of smallpox vaccinations. Williams described his own frustrating discussions with older peasants: “The germ theory sounded far-fetched and fanciful. Better their own theory: To each man his destined lot, and no escaping it; it’s fate that metes out good and evil, life, death and smallpox.” The idea of preventing disease by scratching people with a needle seemed ridiculous, especially when compared with traditional remedies—“the old charms and conjurations that have stood the test of time,” capable of warding off the evil spirits that were obviously the cause of most diseases. “It has happened that the medical corps sent to relieve an epidemic have been taken as the evil spirits themselves,” Williams reported. “The peasants sought to get rid of the disease by killing the doctors.” In other cases, medical workers were simply locked out, accused of being the Antichrist, with screams: “Go away, you devils! Why do you come here to kill our children?” And yet increasing numbers of older children and young adults, especially those with more experience out in the world, were tipping rural culture in another direction. “The old beliefs . . . are dying. Faith in the old incantations is passing with the passing generation.” Williams reported that soon “people on horse and foot” were pushing on to the vaccination center, where “a long line of peasants, sleeves rolled up” were being systematically vaccinated by a white-aproned physician’s assistant. Smallpox vaccinations became obligatory in the Soviet Republic, with thirty-one laboratories devoted exclusively to the preparation of vaccines. While there had been 72,236 cases of smallpox reported in 1913, the number had shot up to 152,094 by 1921—yet by 1924, the number was down to 26,744.74

Veteran US educator Lucy Wilson—observing “the obvious alertness of peasant children”—suggested that “their life experiences, particularly their first-hand contact with nature, have served admirably as the first school for their mental development.” But there were other influences as well. She recounted one journalist’s account of riding to pasture with village boys and girls anxious to absent themselves “from the old people who had learned little from the great events of recent years,” while “the younger generation was very different, for they had been in the Red Army, they had read books, and they had listened to lectures. None of them, not even the little ones, believed in ghosts or spirits, water nymphs or house goblins.”75 Health worker Anna Haines also commented on the “outside influences” in this cultural revolution:

More than three-fourths of the Russians are people living in small villages in the country. Their houses, animal sheds and barnyards are still built and maintained after the fashion of their forefathers, but down in the village reading-room, a sort of social center which has appeared almost everywhere within the last ten years, are several disturbing pictures on the wall. On holidays and winter afternoons many of the younger people drift in and read, often with amusement, that one should sleep with windows open, sink one’s drinking water well somewhere else than most conveniently to the cattle trough, and that the ever-present malaria comes from a mosquito and not from God as a punishment to this evil generation. And then an ex-soldier, who may be reading in another corner, tells them that these things are so, that he has traveled much and learned the truth; and the next few hours are given over to reminiscences and to forecasting of the future of Russia, with electricity in every house, and water out of hydrants, and tractors.76

The generation gap could also been seen among industrial workers. A sixteen-year-old foundry worker, Victor Kravchenko, noted it while listening to lunchtime agitators from the Communist Party in 1921: “The older workers for the most part ignored them, but the younger men and women listened intently. For us it offered hope in a time of general distress and pessimism.” He was also attracted to the factory club, “decorated with lithographs of Lenin, Trotsky, Marx and Engels and slogans in crude white letters on strips of red bunting.” He adds: “I was caught between the skepticism at home and my own thirst for a faith.”77 He didn’t join the group right away, but became increasingly engaged in its activities and meetings.

Kravchenko’s father had been a working-class revolutionary, arrested and imprisoned in earlier years, and initially an eloquent supporter of the 1917 revolution. But he quickly became critical, explaining to his son: “I have been fighting to overthrow Tsarism. For freedom, for plenty, not for violence and vengeance. We should have free elections and many parties. If one party dominates, it’s the end.” His son asked: “What are you, papa? A Menshevik, Bolshevik, a Social Revolutionary?” The father responded: “None of these, Vitya. Always remember this: that no slogan, no matter how attractive, is any indication of the real policy of any political party once it comes to power.”78 Nonetheless, the son eventually decided to join the Komsomol, which (years later) he described in this way:

Now life had for me an urgency, a purpose, a new and thrilling dimension of dedication to a cause. I was one of the elite, chosen by History to lead my country and the whole world out of darkness into the socialist light. This sounds pretentious, I know, yet that is how we talked and felt. There might be cynicism and self-seeking among some of the grown-up Communists, but not in our circle of ardent novitiates.

My privileges, as one of the elect, were to work harder, to disdain money and foreswear personal ambitions. I must never forget that I am a Komsomol first, a person second. The fact that I had joined up in a mining region, in an area of “industrial upsurge,” seemed to me to add a sort of mystic significance to the event. . . .

There was no longer much margin of time for petty amusements. Life was filled with duties—lectures, theatricals for the miners, Party “theses” to be studied and discussed. We were aware always that from our midst must come the Lenins and Bukharins of tomorrow. We were perfecting ourselves for the vocation of leadership; we were the acolytes of a sort of materialist religion.79

There were other youth of this period who observed the same qualities in their Communist peers. “The word ‘comrade’ meant to be closer than family,” recalled Mikhail Baitalsky, remembering “boys and girls with sunken eyes in darkened faces [who] studied in literary circles and classes for the rudiments of political knowledge. They nibbled at the granite of science and called for world revolution. We said the words ‘world revolution’ as often as children say ‘mama’ and just as easily, without self-righteous pretentions.”80 Baitalsky’s description—stressing the qualities of “sincerity and democracy”—matches Kravchenko’s:

Our exhilaration with the ideas of the revolution, our feelings toward Lenin, our hatred for the bourgeoisie—all this came from the depths of our soul. One might say to me: You believed in false doctrines. But I am not examining here whether the theories were true or not, only the sincerity of our behavior.

We were sincere above all because we formulated our views in absolute freedom. Those who did not share them did not join the Komsomol. . . . Komsomol membership brought no privileges . . . The Komsomol was a voluntary organization and, therefore, was not based on falsehood and hypocrisy. It was based on a Communist faith—pure and unsullied—probably much like the faith of the first pre-Christian societies on the shores of the Dead Sea, with their doctrine of justice and their sacred writings that they read many hours each day. In those days we spent whole evenings in our club without being bored. . . .

Democracy is directly related to sincerity in human relations. I speak not about democracy as a social institution but about democracy as an element of social norms. . . . It had one important peculiarity: We viewed ourselves as people of the future. This consciousness was not expressed with any solemnity of purpose or arrogance. On the contrary, it seemed natural and ordinary. For us, a commitment to democracy was like being aware of having a kind of mission—a marvelous mission for universal human equality.81

The kind of psychology, consciousness, and organizational dynamics that Kravchenko and Baitalsky describe regarding the Komsomol of the years 1919–23 captures a much larger reality within the Russian working-class movement. Mark Steinberg explores such things in an illuminating essay covering the prerevolutionary period in “Vanguard Workers and the Morality of Class.” By “vanguard workers” he refers not to those in a specific organization, but to a broader layer within the working class that may be drawn into membership in one or another group—whether it be Menshevik, Bolshevik, Socialist Revolutionary, anarchist (or in the case of Kravchenko’s father, none). Steinberg refers to what he calls a “moral judgment,” which is central to the way that workers crystallize from a class in itself to a class for itself, employing a conceptualization articulated by Marx—that is, what is sometimes referred to as “class consciousness.”82

“Morally literate workers such as these, who were present in most Russian industries during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were not ‘typical’ of their class, but played a central role in the collective life of their class, especially in its conscious self-formation as a class,” Steinberg notes, commenting that often “vanguard workers did not so much speak for other workers as to preach to them, challenging them to think and act in unaccustomed ways.” Such a dynamic might take the form of relatively insulated, self-important, self-righteous groups marked off from the resistant masses. “These worker activists were deeply self-conscious, and thus perceived various boundaries between themselves and a majority of workers.” But the phenomenon became more interesting “starting in 1905 as the class-conscious vanguard was given a larger legal arena—trade unions and legal labor press—and as its message began to attract a mass following (including among them worker activists who had defected from the camp of class collaboration, as they now branded it, to the camp of class struggle).” An aspect of the ongoing “preaching” involved a down-to-earth critique of all that was “ignorant, immoral, drunken, and lacking in culture” among their coworkers—particularly those “ordinary workers” who might prefer “getting drink at the local tavern to spending . . . time with ‘books, theater, and a lively and absorbing discussion in a close circle of comrades.’” Distinguished from the ordinary worker, these “conscious workers” helped to articulate the sense that, as a working-class poet of the late nineteenth century had put it, “we men are not animals, not dumb beasts.”83 Steinberg elaborates:

The idea of the human person, . . . of innate human worth and hence natural rights, remained at the heart of workers’ language of protest in 1905 and after. As before, outspoken workers continued to complain of offenses to workers’ human dignity. They protested that for too long workers had been treated as “animals,” “machines,” and “slaves,” “insulted,” verbally abused, physically beaten, and addressed as inferiors. The time had come, they said, for employers and supervisors “to respect the humanity in each human being” . . . , to remember that “those who work for them are people, the same if not better than themselves.” As was common among many other groups of workers, and other subordinate groups, injustice was defined first of all as indignity.84

Over time, a number of such “conscious workers” became cadres in working-
class movements and organizations. The term cadre can be understood as one who has social and political knowledge, who can win people to ideas of what’s what, who can size up a situation, who can speak well about problems and solutions and how to get from the one to the other, who knows how to make and distribute leaflets and organize successful meetings, who can work with others and draw others into the work, and who can transmit all of these skills to others.

Obviously, not all conscious workers and not all cadres are the same, nor do they all have the same outlook on vitally important questions. This comes through in discussions between Kravchenko and his father in the 1920s:

The passing years had not reconciled my father to the Communists. He was willing to acknowledge that many of them were honest and earnest, but the reality of revolution still had too little resemblance to the dream of his youth. He never interfered with my Komsomol activities and at bottom was pleased that I was carving a place for myself in the new environment. But he could not refrain from bitter comment, now and then, on the contrast between the ample life of the officials and top engineers and the misery of the plain workers.

“We talk about unity, son,” he would say, “and equality. But look how Comrade N. . . . lives, with his big apartment and motor car and good clothes; then look at the barracks where the new workers from the village are packed like sardines. A clean room and decent food in the administration restaurant, but anything is good enough for the workers’ restaurant. . . .”

“Give us time, Papa,” I would plead. “So many problems to be solved at once.”

“I know about the problems. But I also know that the distance between the upper classes and the lower classes is growing bigger, not smaller. Power is a dangerous thing, Vitya.”85

The issue of inequality and power abuse was, as we have seen, linked in the father’s mind with the question of political freedoms and the need for a multiparty system—what Baitalsky had referred to as a larger “democracy as a social institution” in his reflection on democracy and sincerity within the Komsomol. He himself came to conclude, based on later experience, that the one was eroded and undermined without the other: “One-party rule inevitably led to the need for maximum homogeneity of thought within the ruling party itself.” On the issue of material inequality, Baitalsky tells us: “In Lenin’s time, there existed a party maximum pay. . . . Partmaximum means this: For the same post, a member of the party and a non-party specialist are to receive the same pay; but a Communist has the right to keep only such a sum as shall not exceed a certain figure established by the Central Committee.” He notes that “by the end of the 1920s, the partmaximum for Moscow was 250 rubles, the average salary of a skilled worker,” but that in that period enforcement of the partmaximum began to erode, and by 1932 it was totally abolished. “The principle of self-restraint for leading worker-Communists was gradually replaced by the principle of privileges.”86

It was in this period, however, when young Kravchenko finally decided to take the step of joining the Communist Party. It is worth considering the reasons he gave to his father for taking this step, and also worth taking a look specifically at the leading cadre from the Communist Party most responsible for him taking this step: Comrade Lazarev, an intellectual about thirty years old who gave compelling lectures on problems of socialism. (Actually, Lazarev had recruited him, initially, to the Komsomol.) But first let us consider Kravchenko’s explanation to his father for joining the party:

I know that there are plenty of shortcomings, careerism, swinishness and hardship in practical everyday life. I don’t like those things any more than you do. But I look on them as phases which will pass. The job of turning a primitive country into a modern industrialized socialist state is gigantic. It can’t be done without mistakes and even injustices. But I don’t want to stand aside and criticize. I want to work honestly inside the Party, fighting against evil and sustaining what is good.87

The eloquent and friendly mentor who recruited him lived, temporarily, in a small apartment away from his actual home, but sought to give a “homelike” quality to his temporary lodgings “in a spotlessly clean room. The divan was covered with a gay rug; books neatly arranged on the desk between bookends; a few flowers in a colored pitcher.” On one wall there were family pictures; on another, there were “framed photographs of Lenin and Marx and between them—this was the touch that warmed me and won me over, though I did not know exactly why—the familiar picture of Leo Tolstoy in older age, in the long peasant tunic, his thumbs stuck into the woven belt.” Kravchenko describes their discussion in these modest but warm surroundings:

We talked for hours that night, about books, the Party, the future of Russia. My place was with the Communist minority who must show the way, Lazarev said, and I ought to join the Komsomols and later the Party. Of course, he conceded, the Party wasn’t perfect and perhaps its program wasn’t perfect, but people are more important than programs.

“If bright, idealistic young people like you stand aloof, what chance will there be?” he said. “Why not come closer to us and work for the common cause? You can help others by serving as an example of devotion to the country. Just look around you in the barracks—gambling, dirt, drunkenness, greed where there ought to be cleanliness, books, spiritual light. You must understand that there’s a terrific task ahead of us, Augean stables to be cleaned. We must uproot the stale, filthy, unsocial past that’s still everywhere, and for that we need good men. The heart of the question Vitya, is not only formal socialism but decency, education and a brighter life for the masses.”

I had been “pressured” by Communists before this. But now, for the first time, I was hearing echoes of the spirit that had suffused my childhood. I argued with Comrade Lazarev; I said I would think it over, but in fact I agreed with him and had already made up my mind.88

Kravchenko offers an account from a slightly earlier period during the Civil War that provides, in microcosm, a variety of “types” drawn to the Bolshevik cause. As a young worker, Kravchenko is one of many from his area drawn into the armed self-defense unit organized by his father and older workers. Also drawn in is Grachev, a simple and good-hearted semi-peasant who works as a stableman. In the swirl of confusion and conflict, the two of them meet up with a few others from the Red forces making their way through the area, led by the dedicated and idealistic Lihomanov. Among those in the group were a “gross-looking fellow” in a sailor’s uniform who turned out to be a very capable fighter, and a good-looking woman of about thirty, serving as a nurse, who later tells Kravchenko that she had been the daughter of a high tsarist official who—like a significant number of youth from the upper classes—was drawn to the revolutionary cause. As she put it: “When the revolution occurred, I met it with my whole heart. All my life I have loved the plain people and wanted to help them. It was for them that I broke with my family and took courses in the medical school in Kharkov.” While not approving of some of the violence on the revolutionary side, she concluded that “my work is healing, not shooting.”89

The night after the small group of Reds defends itself from a violent attack from White forces, they put up in a small rural house. Kravchenko is awakened by the nurse’s nearby screams when the sailor attempts to rape her. The presence of an awake Kravchenko causes the sailor to flee, muttering “dirty bourgeois!” at the weeping nurse. Contrasting the sailor to Lihomanov (“one of the real ones, a true idealist”), the nurse tells young Kravchenko: “We mustn’t lose faith or renounce the struggles of thousands of honest men, men like Lihomanov, because of dark and bestial creatures like the man who attacked me tonight.” She also commented that her attacker was not even a real sailor, picking up the uniform somewhere and wearing it “because it gave him a certain revolutionary prestige.” When Kravchenko later tells Grachev what happened, his friend reflects: “Yes, Vitya, that nurse is right. There’s good and bad, in the revolution as in everything. The question is: who will come out on top when the revolution settles down, the honest people or the beasts, the Lihomanovs or the fake sailors.”90

The Bolshevik ideal conformed to the “honest” ones who won the hearts and minds of such young workers as Baitalsky, Kravchenko, and their friends. Near the end of the period we are examining, in his widely circulated articles on “The New Course,” Trotsky explained: “A Bolshevik is not merely a disciplined person; he is a person who in each case and on each question forges a firm opinion of his own and defends it courageously and independently, not only against his enemies, but inside his own party.” The Bolshevik leader explained that it was necessary to disagree with something one feels is wrong, even when other comrades, even leaders, disagree with him. “Today, perhaps, he will be in the minority in his organization. He will submit, because it is his party. But this does not always signify that he is in the wrong. Perhaps he saw or understood before the others did a new task or the necessity of a turn.” Sometimes it was necessary to dissent: “He will persistently raise the question a second, a third, a tenth time, if need be. Thereby he will render his party a service, helping it to meet the new task fully armed or to carry out the necessary turn without organic upheavals, without factional convulsions.”91

In the party there were, of course, all kinds. Ante Ciliga, a prominent Yugoslav Communist in Soviet Russia during the late 1920s, later recalled three young women who were active in the Komsomol. Two of them were working-class participants in a study group, one who sat in the front row and “was studying with zeal and success,” the other in the back row “who saw everything in black.” The latter “at every opportunity spoke of the workers’ hard life,” with examples of “the most heartbreaking incidents at the factory and at the home,” challenging with “subdued indignation” the “contradictions between the workers’ realities and the writings in books and papers.” For her front-row antagonist, animated by a systematic optimism, “the masses” in the factories and villages were heroic abstractions who followed heroic leaders, and “all the ‘shortcomings’ and ‘accidents’ were ironed out by this official optimism.” Various classmates were drawn more to one or the other. In contrast to both was the nineteen-year-old daughter of a party official—“beautiful, intelligent, energetic”—who worked in a factory while taking technical courses at night and, on occasion, carrying out “special assignments” with her husband abroad. “Was this not a couple from the vanguard?” Ciliga asked rhetorically. “But looking more closely one discovered the deepest corruption hidden beneath a veil of virtue.” He went on to explain: “To that young woman nothing counted but her career and that of her husband. She had the gift of considering everything from the point of view of advancement in the administration.”92

It was in this period that developments were underway, bringing some of the cadres into very different trajectories. Trotsky, from exile, described the culmination of one of these trajectories in 1932: “On the foundation of the dictatorship of the proletariat—in a backward country, surrounded by capitalists—for the first time a powerful bureaucratic apparatus has been created from among the upper layers of the workers, that is raised above the masses, that lays down the law to them, that has at its disposal colossal resources, that is bound together by an inner mutual responsibility, and that intrudes into the policies of a workers’ government its own interests, methods, and regulations.” Trotsky was merciless in describing the ex-working-class functionary: “He eats and guzzles and procreates and grows himself a respectable potbelly. He lays down the law with a sonorous voice, handpicks from below people faithful to him, remains faithful to his superiors, prohibits others from criticizing himself, and sees in all of this the gist of the general line.”93