come to their aid from Ukraine, even though Makhno had by this stage fled to Romania. The political influence of the SRs was everywhere in evidence; but although there were a fair number of demands for the return of the Constituent Assembly, the most widespread slogan was for 'Soviets without communists'. Convinced that the 'toiler-and-peasant government has long since ceased to exist', rebels wished to see the communist regime overthrown; yet they remained powerfully drawn to the soviet idea, which they associated with the overthrow of the landlords and rule by the toilers.
Between 1917 and 1920 the number of factory and mine workers fell
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In the purely peasant and semi-proletarian provinces soviet power in general and the Communist Party in particular has no social base. You will not find there broad layers of the population who are committed to us, who share our programme, and are ready to act for us. I am not speaking about kulaks or the remnants of the bourgeoisie, of which hardly any remain. I am talking about the broad mass of workers, artisans, and, especially, peasants. We have contrived to frighten off the mass of middle and poor peasants. Voluntary mobilization has failed. We met with the refusal of entire trade unions to give up even one man. And matters with the peasantry were entirely antipathetic. I do not say that these are consciously counterrevolutionary forces, they are not. But the mass of the population is indifferent or hostile to our party. In many districts they are waiting for Kolchak. It's true that when he arrives the mood changes to our benefit, but not for long. The reasons for this are many. But the central fact - and this is true on a national level -is that we have actually given nothing to the peasants except hardship. Terror reigns. We hold on only through terror. Report of lu. M. Steklov, editor of
from 3.6 million to 1.5 million. Over a million workers returned to their villages, several hundred thousand departed for the Red Army, and tens of thousands left to take up administrative and managerial positions in the soviet, trade-union, and party organs. Workers suffered a huge drop in living standards. By 1920 the real value of the average 'wage' was reckoned to be 38% of the 1913 level, although this was made up largely of rations, free housing, transport, clothing, and other goods. At the same time, elements of coercion and hierarchy were being reintroduced into the workplace. Not surprisingly, therefore, worker discontent was rife. The Bolsheviks explained this as being the result of 'declassing', i.e.
the strengthening of 'petty-bourgeois elements' in the working class. It is true that many of their most ardent supporters left the factories; but within a much depleted workforce the ratio between the core of skilled and experienced workers and the larger group of less skilled, less experienced women and recent recruits probably remained about the same as it had been in 1917.
As early as spring 1918, worker support for the government started rapidly to ebb, as unemployment, food shortages, and declining wages began to bite. Mounting bitterness manifested itself in a revival of support for Mensheviks and SRs. From early March in Tula, Petrograd, and elsewhere Mensheviks formed assemblies of factory plenipotentiaries to campaign for civil rights, independent trade unions, and free soviet elections, with the ultimate aim of reconvening the Constituent Assembly. In Petrograd, where the movement was ? strongest, the Assembly had 200 delegates, who claimed to represent g two-thirds of the city's workforce. The С heka foiled a plan by'this group e of pretenders and counter-revolutionaries' to call a general strike on jg 2 July; but it is clear that their support was by no means firm. As the
The 'democratic counter-revolution' received the support of many workers. N. I. Podvoisky, chair of the Supreme Military Inspectorate, reported from the Volga provinces:
With rare exceptions workers are hostile to soviet power. Unemployed from the demobilized factories are the most hostile towards us and a certain number of workers at the Pipe and Cartridge factories in Samara have gone over to the Cossacks.
At Izhevsk in Viatka province SR Maximalists in the Red Guard so
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alienated the local populace with their requisitions, searches, and arrests that the Mensheviks and SRs triumphed in the soviet elections in May 1918, prompting the Bolsheviks to shut the soviet down. When the Czech Legion approached on 5 August the SR-dominated veterans' association, backed by workers from the huge munitions plant, seized control of the town. Thousands of workers, including those at the neighbouring Votkinsk works, joined the People's Army, which was defeated by the Reds in mid-November, some later joining Kolchak. The most violent confrontation between Bolsheviks and workers, however, occurred in Astrakhan, a fishing town on the lower Volga in a strategically very sensitive area. On 10 March 1919 striking metallurgical workers, demanding free trade and an increase in food rations, clashed with sailors. A crowd, including deserters from the 45th regiment, then attacked the Communist headquarters, killing several officials. S. Kirov, chair of the military revolutionary committee, ordered 'the merciless extermination of the White Guard swine' and in several days' fighting a couple of thousand insurgents were slaughtered. Yet in general workers loathed the Whites, who were energetic in suppressing trade unions and restoring factory owners to power in the areas under their control. Following Kolchak's coup in November 1918, there was a spate of political strikes and disturbances in the cities and mining regions of Siberia. The strike by miners in Cheremkhovo in December 1919 signalled a turning-point in Red fortunes. In the Donbas, too, where General S. V. Denisov had hundreds of miners in luzivka hanged, the Whites were equally detested.
The crystallization of the civil war into a struggle between Reds and Whites had the effect of firming up worker support for the Red cause, but that is not to say that it was ever solid. Throughout the civil war there were regular stoppages, mostly limited in scope and duration. In 1920 in 18 provinces under Red control there were 146 strikes involving 135,000 workers, most of them provoked by problems of food supply. By spring 1920, over 1 million were on special rations, yet on average these were fulfilled by only a quarter or a fifth. Such stoppages cannot
be dismissed simply as 'economic', since workers now depended on the state for the fulfilment of their basic needs. The strikes, therefore, inevitably had political implications, which frequently took the form of attacks on the privileges of officials: 'the communists receive high salaries and food rations, eat three dishes in their canteens, while we are given slops as though we were pigs'. Furthermore, the fanatical way in which the regime dealt with strikes further politicized them. In 1920, after the civil war was over, the chair of the provincial party committee in Ekaterinoslav reported:
'In September the workers here rose up against the despatdi to the countryside of food detachments. We decided to pursue an iron policy. We dosed down the tram park, fired all workers and employees, and sent some of them to the concentration camp; those of the appropriate age we sent to the front, others we handed over to the Cheka.'
с о
g This may have been an extreme response, but confiscation of strikers'
I
e ration cards, deployment of armed force, and mass dismissals
jg followed by selective rehiring were standard weapons in the Bolshevik
