Russian revolution. A very short introduction

Initially, Lenin seems to have thought that socialist measures were on

the agenda, since he ratified decrees nationalizing the banks, railways,

merchant fleet, and many mines and joint-stock companies. However,

during the harsh winter his enthusiasm for nationalization cooled; by

March 1918 he was claiming that 'state capitalism will be our salvation',

by which he meant that most enterprises would remain in private

ownership but be subject to regulation by state-run cartels. This proved

to be a non-starter, since few capitalists were ready to cooperate with

the proletarian state. Moreover, this was precisely the time when

pressure for nationalization was intensifying at the grass roots, as-

factory committees and Soviets 'nationalized' enterprises whose owners д

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had fled or were suspected of sabotage. Between November 1917 and | March 1918, 836 enterprises were'nationalized'from below in this way. = Unable to resist this momentum, and aware that the Treaty of Brest- Litovsk made it liable to pay compensation to German nationals owning shares in private Russian companies, the government on 28 June moved decisively towards full-scale nationalization, taking some 2,000 joint-stock companies into state ownership. Henceforth the drive to nationalize proved unstoppable, fuelled mainly by the conviction that it was evidence of progress towards socialism.

After October 1917 the lamentable level of industrial productivity plunged still further as a result of wear- and-tear on machinery, supply problems and the fall in labour intensity, which was itself due to poor diet, absenteeism (brought on by the search for food and the necessity of working on the side) and, not least, by the breakdown in labour discipline. From early 1918, the trade unions struggled to combat falling productivity by restoring the piece-rate which linked wages to output.

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As part of his more sober evaluation of revolutionary prospects, Lenin now pronounced that the key task facing the Russian worker was to 'learn how to work'. From spring 1918, he campaigned for a single individual to be put in charge of each enterprise, a demand that struck at the heart of workers' self-management. Throughout 1919 he faced stiff resistance from those who defended the existing system of collegial management, whereby nationalized enterprises were run by boards comprising one-third workers plus representatives of technical staff, trade unions, and state economic organs. But Lenin was never one to give up. By 1920,82% of enterprises were under one-person management. At the same time, he campaigned for the authority of technical specialists to be restored and for them to receive salaries commensurate with their expertise, arguing that the latter was more important than 'zeal', 'human qualities', or 'saintliness'. This, too, proved deeply unpopular. As one worker told the Ninth Party ? Conference in September 1920:'I'll goto my grave hating spetsy g [technical specialists].... We have to hold them in a grip of iron, the e way they used to hold us.' By the end of the civil war, not much was left jg of the democratic forms of industrial administration promoted by the 1 factory committees in 1917, but the government argued that this did not matter since industry had passed into the ownership of a workers' state.

During the civil war the autonomy of trade unions was also drastically curtailed. As early as January 1918 the First Trade-Union Congress rejected Menshevik demands that the unions remain 'independent', contending that in a workers' statetheirchief function was to'organize production and restorethe battered productive forces of the country'. From 1919, however, efforts to place workers under military discipline led to much friction between unions and government. This culminated in August 1920 in Trotsky's peremptory replacement of the elected boards of the railway and water-transport unions with a Central Committee for Transport that combined the functions of commissariat, political organ, and trade union. This sparked a fierce debate in which

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Trotsky and Bukharin called for the complete absorption of the trade unions into the state; M. P. Tomsky, on behalf of the trade unions, defended a degree of trade-union autonomy but concurred that their principal task was to oversee the implementation of economic policy; and the Workers' Opposition urged that the unions be given complete responsibility for running the economy. The Tenth Party Congress in March 1921 castigated the latter view as an 'anarcho-syndicalist deviation' and gave overwhelming backing to a compromise resolution from Lenin that backed away from the idea of rapid 'statization' of the trade unions, insisting that they still had a residual function of defending workers' interests and stressing their role as 'schools of communism'.

Many of the same pressures that led to the centralization of decisionmaking within the party also led to hyper-centralization of the economic organs. In response to scarcity and fragmentation of powerat the local level, where often a multiplicity of inexperienced Soviets, economic councils, trade unions, and factory committees vied to commandeer resources and resolve local problems, the Supreme Council of the Economy struggled to impose central coordination. It was responsible chiefly for administering and financing industry, but it also intervened in the procurement and distribution of supplies, and even in transportation, food, and labour allocation. It was hardly a watchword for efficiency, being organized according to a dual principle. Boards, each with its own vertical hierarchy, presided over each branch of industry but competed with a geographically organized hierarchy of county- and province-level economic councils. In practice, this meant that dozens of overlapping and autonomous hierarchies functioned with few if any horizontal links to the relevant government commissariats. Trotsky described how in the Urals one province ate oats, while another fed wheat to horses; yet nothing could be done without the consent of the food commissariat in Moscow. On 30 November 1918 the whole system was capped by a Defence Council, vested with extraordinary powers to mobilize material and human

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resources for the Red Army and to coordinate the war effort at the front and in the rear. The most that can be said is that the system succeeded in targeting scarce supplies of materials, fuel, and manufactures on the Red Army. The drawbacks were that it was wasteful and hugely bureaucratic - the ratio of white-collar employees to workers in nationalized industries rising from one in ten in 1918 to one in seven in 1920.

The most critical problem facing the Bolshevik government in these years was that of food supply. To the existing reluctance of peasants to market grain were added new problems. First, the break-up of the landowners' estates strengthened subsistence farming at the expense of cash crops. Second, the loss of Ukraine deprived the Bolsheviks of a region that had produced 35% of marketed grain, and the grain area at its disposal was further cut when war came to many Volga provinces ? and to Siberia. Meanwhile the snarl-up on the railways, which was due g to fuel shortages, the deterioration of track and rolling stock, and the

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e devolution of control to local railway unions, meant that much of the jg food that was procured vanished or rotted before it reached the centres 1 of consumption. Finally, the attempt to regulate grain supply was undermined by the boom in profiteering. The winter of 1917-18 was exceptionally severe: by early 1918 the bread ration in Petrograd was down at times to as little as 50 grams a day. In addition to the desperate efforts of workers' organizations to lay their hands on grain, profiteering by petty traders flourished. In Ivanovo- Voznesensk province so-called 'baggers' imported about 3 million puds of grain (one pud being equal to 16.5 kilograms) between 1 August 1917 and 1 January 1918, two-and-a-half times the amount procured by food authorities. Buying up grain in grain-surplus provinces for 10-12 rubles a pud, they sold it for 50-70 rubles, at a time when the fixed price was still only 3-4 rubles.

In the first months the government hoped desperately that by boosting production of goods such as fabrics, salt, sugar, and kerosene, it would

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