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The Bolsheviks saw the hand of the opposition behind any outbreak of worker unrest and their response was invariably to arrest workers known to beSRs or Mensheviks. While it is doubtful that the latter were in a position to instigate worker protest, they we re able to exert political influence. On 10 March 1919 Putilov workers, angry at the absence of bread, passed a Left SR resolution by 10,000 votes to 22, excoriating the 'servile yoking of workers to the factories' and calling for the destruction of the 'commissarocracy'. Yet support for the opposition was basically an expression of anger and frustration rather than of principled commitment. Attitudes were volatile and the same workers could react in different ways at different times. So long as civil war dragged on, it is fair to say that in spite of their deep disaffection, workers showed no desire to jeopardize the operations of the Red Army.
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Thus when ludenich, the White general, threatened Petrograd in autumn 1920, many worked a 16-hour day to defeat him. Moreover, if it only took a handful of oppositionists to give political form to economic discontent, it often simply required the party to send in agitators and extra supplies to dispel support for the opposition. At the beginning of 1920, the Menshevik leader L. Martov conceded:
So long as we branded Bolshevism, we were applauded; as soon as we went on to say that a changed regime was needed to fight Denikin successfully our audience turned cold or even hostile.
Doubtless a minority believed that the regime had comprehensively betrayed the revolution; but the attitudes of the majority were more contradictory. Many ideals of the revolution had bitten deep: workers evinced fierce hostility to
The sailors and soldiers of Kronstadt, an island in the Gulf of Finland, some 30 kilometres from Petrograd, put their lives on the line for the ideals of 1917. On 1 March 1921,16,000 of them passed a resolution calling for the dismantling of War Communism, the devolution of power to freely elected Soviets, for freedoms of speech, the press, and association. There was no express call for the overthrow of soviet power, although once the rebels were under siege some did adopt that aim. Perhaps 12,000 out of 18,000 military and 8,000 to 9,000 adult male civilians out of a total civilian population of 30,000 threw in their lot with the rebels. The Bolsheviks responded decisively. On 7 March military operations to suppress the rebellion began, but effective leadership from professional officers on the island meant that the Reds were repulsed with heavy losses. Only on 17 March were 45,000 Red troops ready to launch an assault; by the following daythe island was in
Bolshevik hands. Since 700 Soviet troops had been killed and 2,500 injured, reprisals against the rebels were harsh. By summer 1921, 2,103 prisoners had been sentenced to death - though the actual number shot was in the hundreds - and 6,459 sentenced to imprisonment. The Bolsheviks portrayed the rebellion as a 'White Guard plot'. Certainly, White agents sought to exploit the rebellion; but the rebels' dream of local autonomy and their loathing of privilege were anathema to the Whites. Moreover, they turned down a request by Chernov, the SR leader, to visit the island. The Bolsheviks were probably right to think that had the rebels succeeded, it would have led either to the disintegration of the state or to a White restoration. The real choice was still between a Red or a White dictatorship. That said, the Bolsheviks could havedealt with the rebels in a less bloody fashion. It was not clear that they wanted armed confrontation and there was a reasonable chance for compromise, given that the Bolsheviks could have offered an end to War Communism as a quid pro quo. Yet they would brook no compromise. Curiously, their intransigence seems to have arisen less from confidence, even though the rising was poorly timed and ill- prepared, than from insecurity. Knowing how deeply hated they were, the Bolsheviks sensed that any show of weakness would encourage rebels elsewhere. By suppressing the sailors of Kronstadt they bade farewell to the most cherished - and Utopian - ideals of 1917. Henceforward nothing further would be heard of power to the Soviets, workers' self-management, or a democratic army: the nature of the revolution had changed for good.
The political developments of the civil war defied every Bolshevik expectation. In October 1917 when the worker A. V. Shotman ventured to doubt whether 'even a cook or housekeeper' could administer the state, as Lenin had claimed in
of government, their perspective on reality changed. As early as August 1918, in a deliberate pitch to those ready to support any government so long as it could guarantee they would not be shot or robbed on the street, Bukharin wrote an article in
Historians debate the extent to which the party-state came into being as the result of Bolshevik ideology or the pressures of civil war. Some argue that the seeds of Bolshevik tyranny lay in the Marxist notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat; others in Lenin's notion of the vanguard party with its implication that the party knew what was best for the working class. Such fundamental tenets certainly played a part in bringing an authoritarian party-state into being. Yet the civil war was as much about certain principles being jettisoned as about others being confirmed. The decentralized vision of socialism associated with 1917 -soviet democracy, workers' self- management - was permanently sidelined. State, party, and army- not the Soviets or factory committees - now came to be seen as the bearers of revolution. The fact that ideology evolved in this way suggests that it was not the sole or even paramount driving force behind the creation of the party dictatorship. If the seeds of dictatorship lay in ideology, they only came
to fruition in the face of the remorseless demands placed on party and state by civil war and economic collapse.
The culture of the party was profoundly changed by civil war. The atmosphere of pervasive violence and destruction, the unremitting popular hostility, sharpened dictatorial and brutal reflexes. The Bolshevik ethos had always been one of ruthlessness, authoritarianism, and 'class hatred', but in the context of civil war these qualities transmogrified into cruelty, fanaticism, and absolute intolerance of those who thought differently. The invasion of foreign powers, the failure of revolution to spread across Europe, bred a mentality of encirclement, of Russia as an armed fortress, as well as an obsession with enemies: The enemy keeps watch over us and is ready at any minute to exploit our every blunder, mistake, or gesture of vacillation.' The fact that the Bolsheviks achieved victory in the war - albeit at a ? punishing cost - strengthened illusions of infallibility. It was such g attitudes that increasingly
