sympathy for the revolution. The army of typists, filing clerks, cashiers, accountants, storekeepers, and drivers had a low level of education, were inefficient, reluctant to take initiative, and imbued with an ethos of red tape and routinism. Officials tended to throw their weight around, whilst deferring to those above them on the bureaucratic ladder, to scramble for petty privilege, and to defend their narrow departmental turf. In the countryside, where there were fewer officials inherited from the tsarist regime, a new breed of 'soviet' official arose, many of whom had done service in the Red Army. A report from the Penza provincial Cheka in summer 1920 was typical:
In the countryside we must quench the appetites of those 'commissars' who on going into the village consider it their sacred duty to get blind drunk, and then take other pleasures, such as raping women, shooting, and so forth.
In that year the Commissariat of State Control received tens of thousands of complaints about bribery, speculation, embezzlement, drunkenness, and sabotage mainly on the part of officials in the township Soviets.
By 1920-1 there was a crisis of morale within the Communist Party. Disaffection at the trend towards authoritarianism, exemplified in the suppression of debate and the Secretariat's riding roughshod over lower-level organizations, merged with disaffection at the careerism and corruption rampant in the party-state in an anguished debate
At the beginning of September this year in the blessed town of Sergiev-Posad in Moscow province, P. V. Krutov, an old party worker and member of the militia from Bulakvoskaia township, was arrested as he was returning from a visit to the district militia headquarters in Sofrino and thrown into the guard house of the county military commissariat. This was on the whim of some 'boss' who, when asked 'Who goes there?', said 'I'm arresting you,' supposedly because he thought Krutov was a deserter who had the wrong documents. Having sat for several hours in the guard house, not knowing what was happening, comrade Krutov managed to persuade a non-party Red army soldier to bail him out so that he could personally explain to his communist comrades what had happened, and ask them to defend his honour as a Communist Party member. He went at once to the county deserters' commission where, he supposed, the documents taken from him must be. But what a genuinely 'communist defence' lay in store for him!! The chairman of the Sergiev desertion commission, the communist Kalmykov, at first tormented comrade Krutov by keeping him waiting, as happens everywhere. Then he ordered him to collect his documents from room 26, but they weren't there. When Krutov reappeared at Kalmykov's office to request his documents, Kalmykov turned into a veritable tsarist gendarme, bawling at Krutov: 'You were told to wait there. GET OUT OF HERE!' That's how 'committed communists' throw their weight about here in the provinces and consciously and precisely resurrect tsarist ways of behaviour.
Letter from S. Kriukov, Red Army soldier and party member no. 219258, to the newspaper
about the nature and causes of'bureaucracy' in the new order. Both leadership and the Democratic Centralists saw it as stemming from the entry into the party-state of 'class aliens' and both agreed that the key to solving the problem lay in the promotion of workers to positions of responsibility. Neither side, however, appreciated that the major cause of 'bureaucracy' lay in the massive expansion of the party-state itself. Nor did they appreciate that proletarians promoted into official positions would not necessarily behave differently from those who had once worked for the tsarist administration, since bureaucrats derive motivation from the technical functions they perform. Where leadership and opposition parted company was over the latter's call for greater internal partydemocracy asacounterto bureaucracy. When the leader of the Democratic Centralists called for the Central Committee to be made more accountable, Lenin retorted:
Soviet socialist democracy is not incompatible with one-person management or dictatorship. A dictator can sometimes express the will of a dass, since he will sometimes achieve more alone and thus be more necessary.
It was a position from which he was never to retreat. Since 1917 Lenin had come to believe that centralization of power was imperative if the revolution was to be safeguarded; the most that could be allowed was for the masses to monitor those who ruled on their behalf.
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Chapter 3
War Communism
After October the economy galloped from crisis to near collapse. By 1920-1 industrial output was one-fifth, average labour productivity one-third, and coal production and consumer goods production one-quarter of 1913 levels. Plummeting output, compounded by the Allied blockade and disorganization of the transport system, placed severe constraints on the Bolsheviks' room for manoeuvre. To mobilize the battered forces of industry and agriculture to meet the needs of war, they set in place policies that were retrospectively labelled 'War Communism'. These policies comprised an extremely centralized system of economic administration; the complete nationalization of industry; a state monopoly on grain and other agricultural products; a ban on private trade and the restriction of monetary-commodity exchange; rationing of key consumer items; and the imposition of military discipline on workers. Historians debate whether these policies originated in the Bolshevik intention to move as rapidly as possible towards communism, or whether they were principally dictated bythe exigencies of economic collapse and civil war, rooted in expediency rather than ideology.
The Bolsheviks came to power intent on imposing state regulation on the economy, but uncertain as to how far it could be transformed along socialist lines. The Central Council of Factory Committees pressed for a Supreme Economic Council to regulate the economy and state finances, established on 2 December, together with an 'active'form of workers'
control of production as an integral element of this system of economic
regulation. The Decree on Workers' Control passed on 14 November -
the third most popular of the Bolsheviks' founding decrees after peace
and land -was obsolete within weeks as the Bolsheviks decided that the
rising tide of economic chaos required that the factory committees be
integrated into the more centralized apparatus of the trade unions.
