The Penguin History of Modern Russia

of censorship embodied in the Decree on the Press; on the other, the party appealed to them to lend their support to the revolutionary regime — and material benefits were offered to those willing to comply.

Some responded positively. The operatic bass Fedr Shalyapin sang his repertoire to packed theatres at cheap seat-prices. The Jewish painter Marc Chagall was given a large studio in Vitebsk where he taught workers to paint. Even the poet Sergei Yesenin believed the best of the Russian Communist Party, declaring that the intelligentsia was like ‘a bird in a cage, fluttering desperately to avoid a calloused, gentle hand that wanted only to take it out and let it fly free’.²⁹ It would be hard to imagine a statement of more naive trust in the party’s tolerance. Yesenin’s friend and fellow poet Alexander Blok harboured no such illusions; but even Blok felt no hostility to the October Revolution as such. His great poem, The Twelve, caught the chaotic spirit of the times through the image of a dozen ill-disciplined revolutionaries tramping the streets of Petrograd, talking about politics and sex and engaging in occasional acts of thuggery, and Blok was caught between admiration and repulsion for them.

Most intellectuals in the arts and scholarship were more hostile even than Blok to the Bolsheviks and saw the Decree on the Press as a preliminary step towards a comprehensive cultural clampdown. But there were few heroes amidst the intelligentsia. The times precluded the composition of lengthy works castigating Bolshevism: novels are not written in revolutions. Material circumstances, too, had an influence. Intellectuals could not live by ideas alone. Most of them were worse off than workers, who were given larger food rations by Sovnarkom. Increasingly the official authorities tried to suborn the intelligentsia by giving bread and money in return for newspaper articles, posters and revolutionary hymns. Hunger, more than direct censorship, pulled the intellectuals into political line.³⁰ And so a tacit truce was coming into effect. The regime obtained the educative tracts it desired while the intellectuals waited to see what would happen next.

The intelligentsia of the arts, science and scholarship was not alone in being courted by the Bolsheviks. Also indispensable to the maintenance of communist rule was the expertise of engineers, managers and administrators. The dictatorship of the proletariat, as Lenin continued to emphasize, could not dispense with ‘bourgeois’ specialists until a generation of working-class socialist specialists had been trained to replace them.³¹

More than that: Lenin suggested that Russian industry was so backward that its small and medium-size enterprises should be exempted from nationalization and aggregated into large capitalist syndicates responsible for each great sector of industry, syndicates which would introduce up-to-date technology and operational efficiency. Capitalism still had a role to play in the country’s economic development; socialism could not instantly be created. But the Soviet authorities would be able to direct this process for the benefit of socialism since they already owned the banks and large factories and controlled commerce at home and abroad.³² Sovnarkom would preside over a mixed economy wherein the dominant influence would be exerted by socialist institutions and policies. Capitalism, once it had ceased to be useful, would be eradicated.

Lenin’s term for this particular type of mixed economy was ‘state capitalism’, and in April 1918 he encouraged the iron and steel magnate V. P. Meshcherski to submit a project for joint ownership between the government and Meshcherski’s fellow entrepreneurs.³³ This pro-capitalist initiative caused an outcry on the Bolshevik party’s Left. Brest-Litovsk had been one doctrinal concession too many for them, and Lenin lacked the political authority to insist on accepting Meshcherski’s project. It is anyway open to query whether Lenin and Meshcherski could have worked together for very long to mutual advantage. Lenin hated the bourgeoisie, depriving it of civic rights after the October Revolution. When it looked as if the Germans were going to overrun Petrograd in January, he had recommended the shooting on the spot of the party’s class enemies.³⁴ Meshcherski was a rare industrialist who briefly considered political cohabitation with Lenin to be feasible.

There was anyway full agreement between Lenin and the Left Communists that the party had to strengthen its appeal to the workers. All Bolshevik leaders looked forward to a time when their own endeavours in basic education and political propaganda would have re-educated the entire working class. But in the interim they had to be satisfied by the promotion of outstanding representatives of the ‘proletariat’ to administrative posts within the expanding Soviet state institutions. Talented, loyal workers were invited to become rulers in their own dictatorship.

A rising proportion of the civilian state administration by 1918–19 claimed working-class origins. Here the Petrograd metal-workers were prominent, who supplied thousands of volunteers for service in local government. In the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs the removal of tsarist personnel had been started under the Provisional Government and the process continued under Sovnarkom throughout the agencies of administration. Social background counted heavily as a qualification for promotion; but there was also a need for the promotees to be comfortable with paper-work. Soviets at central and local levels discovered how difficult it was to find enough such people.³⁵ The ‘localities’ asked the ‘centre’ to provide competent personnel; the ‘centre’ made the same request of the ‘localities’. But demography told against the hopes of Bolshevism. There were over three million industrial workers in 1917, and the number tumbled to 2.4 million by the following autumn. A predominantly ‘proletarian’ administration was impossible.

Furthermore, the official percentages were misleading. As small and medium-size businesses went bankrupt, their owners had to secure alternative employment. Jobs for them were unavailable in the economy’s shrinking private sector; but desk jobs in an ever-swelling administration were plentiful: all it took was a willingness to pretend to be of working-class background. Many ‘petit-bourgeois elements’, as the Russian Communist Party designated them, infiltrated the institutions of state after the October Revolution.

Meanwhile many members of the urban working class proved troublesome. The violence used by Sovnarkom was a shock to popular opinion, and the labour-forces of Petrograd metal and textile plants, which had once supported the Bolsheviks, led the resistance. With some assistance from the Menshevik activists, they elected representatives to an Assembly of Plenipotentiaries in Petrograd in spring 1918.³⁶ The Assembly bore similarities to the Petrograd Soviet after the February Revolution inasmuch as it was a sectional organization whereby workers aimed to obtain civic freedoms and larger food rations. But the Assembly operated in a hostile environment. The workers were tired, hungry and disunited. Among them were many who still sympathized with several Bolshevik policies. The communists were ruthless. In May a demonstration by Assembly supporters at the nearby industrial town of Kolpino was suppressed by armed troops. The message could not have been blunter that the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ would be defended by any means against the demands of the proletariat itself.

So that the question arose: how new was the world being built by Lenin and Sovnarkom? The RSFSR had facets reminiscent of the tsarist order at its worst. Central state power was being asserted in an authoritarian fashion. Ideological intolerance was being asserted and organized dissent suppressed. Elective principles were being trampled under foot. The tendency for individuals to take decisions without consultation even with the rest of their committees was on the rise.

Lenin in The State and Revolution had stated that his government would combine a vigorous centralism with a vigorous local autonomy.³⁷ The balance was already tilted in favour of a centralism so severe that the communists quickly became notorious for authoritarian excesses; and, in the light of Lenin’s casualness about the restraints of democratic procedure throughout 1917, this was hardly surprising. The Bolsheviks wanted action and practical results. As proponents of efficient ‘account-keeping and supervision’ they presented themselves as the enemies of bureaucratic abuse. Yet their own behaviour exacerbated the problems they denounced. There was an increase in the number of administrators, whose power over individuals rose as the existing restraints were demolished. In addition, the Soviet state intruded into economic and social affairs to a greater depth than attempted by the Romanov Emperors — and the increased functions assumed by the state gave increased opportunities to deploy power arbitrarily.

A cycle of action and reaction was observable. As Sovnarkom failed to obtain its desired political and economic results, Lenin and his colleagues assumed that the cause was the weakness of hierarchical supervision. They therefore invented new supervisory institutions. More and more paperwork was demanded as proof of compliance. At the same time officials were licensed to do whatever they felt necessary to secure the centrally- established targets. And, moreover, new laws, decrees, regulations, commands and instructions cascaded from higher to lower organs of authority even though law in general was held in official disrespect. The unsurprising consequence of these contradictory phenomena continued to surprise the Russian Communist Party’s leadership: a rise in bureaucratic inefficiency and abuse.

Herein lay grounds for a popular disgruntlement with the communists which would have existed even if the party had not applied force against dissenters and if there had been no fundamental crisis in economic and