A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

the Bolsheviks' demand for loyalty and the ambitions of the party's growing rank and file. One of its results was to promote third-rate party hacks, corrupt opportunists and semi-literate elements from the lower classes into positions of real power. This low cultural level of the Soviet bureaucracy was to be a permanent legacy of October which would later come to haunt the Bolshevik leaders.

Because of the Civil Service strike, which made it impossible to set up a system of cabinet rule, the MRC continued to function as the effective government until mid-November. By that time most of the People's Commissars had gained enough control of their respective ministries to enable the transfer of executive authority to Sovnarkom. But Sovnarkom was no ordinary cabinet government. For one thing, there was no clear division between the interests of the party and the government. The meetings of Sovnarkom, which were chaired by Lenin in the Bolshevik headquarters at Smolny, discussed party and government matters interchangeably; Central Committee resolutions were implemented as Soviet decrees. Everything about the early work of Sovnarkom presented a picture of hasty improvisation. Its meetings had no formal agenda and everything was discussed as 'urgent business', while Lenin drew up the appropriate resolutions and, when the moment was right, announced them to the meeting. They were usually passed without discussion, since few dared question Lenin's judgement.

There was, according to many observers, a conspiratorial atmosphere at

these meetings. It was as if the Bolsheviks were psychologically unable to make the transition from an underground fighting organization to a responsible party of national government. They could not bring themselves to exchange their leather jackets for ministerial suits. Simon Liberman, who sometimes sat in on the Sovnarkom meetings, recalled that:

despite all the efforts of an officious secretary to impart to each session the solemn character of a cabinet meeting, we could not help feeling that here we were, attending another sitting of an underground revolutionary committee! For years we had belonged to various underground organizations. All of this seemed so familiar. Many of the commissars remained seated in their topcoats or greatcoats; most of them wore the forbidding leather jackets.⁴⁴

The Bolsheviks never quite succeeded in ridding themselves of their underground habits. Even as late as 1921, Lenin still gave the impression of a party conspirator rather than a statesman. It was of course a common phenomenon — one might call it the Jacobin Syndrome — which in part explains the tendency of the revolutionary state to perpetuate violence and terror. But the Bolsheviks took it one step further than the Jacobins. Theirs was the first of the twentieth-century dictatorships (followed by those of Mussolini, Hitler, Franco and Castro) to glorify its own violent past through propaganda and the adoption of military symbols and emblems. It was as if this cult of violence was central to the Bolshevik self-image, an end in itself rather than the means.

Just as the party came to overshadow the work of Sovnarkom, so Sovnarkom came to overshadow the work of the Soviet Executive. Although the Bolshevik seizure of power had been carried out in the name of the Soviet Congress, Lenin had no intention of ruling through the Congress, or its permanent executive. He did not believe in the principle of parliamentary sovereignty, even when the parliament in question was a Soviet one with, technically at least, an inbuilt Bolshevik majority. In the first weeks after the October coup the Soviet Executive was a real parliamentary brake on Sovnarkom. The Left SRs, the Anarchists and the tiny group of Menshevik Internationalists grouped around Gorky's Ncvaia zhizn', were a vocal opposition, which, if joined by the Bolshevik moderates, could almost overturn the Leninist majority. In mid-November, when the leaders of the Peasant Soviet, or rather its left wing,* were added to the

* The Right SRs had called a Second Congress of Peasant Soviets to rally support against the Bolshevik regime, but it was swamped by left-wing delegates from the soldiers' committees and the lower-level Soviet organizations, causing the Right SRs to walk out in protest. The left-wing leaders then passed a resolution to merge this 'Extraordinary' Congress with the AU-Russian Soviet Executive.                                                                                                                                  ,.,.

Soviet Executive, the potential strength of this opposition was even further increased. On 24 November it actually gained a majority of one for a motion of censure against the Bolshevik closure of the Petrograd City Duma eight days before, although on a recount the decision was reversed.

Yet the merger with the Peasant Soviet was also a critical turning point in the demise of the Soviet Executive as a legislative institution (which was almost certainly what Lenin had intended). To the 108 peasant deputies were added a further 100 delegates from the revolutionary organizations in the army and navy, and half that number again from the trade unions. This more than tripled its size, to 366 members, which was far too many to serve as an effective executive body. The burden of decision-making was thus shifted to Sovnarkom. From mid-November the Soviet Executive began to meet less often (once or twice a week), while Sovnarkom meetings became more frequent (once or twice a day). The volume of legislative acts brought before the Soviet Executive also sharply diminished, as Sovnarkom began to rule by decree. On 4 November Sovnarkom decreed itself the right to pass urgent legislation without approval from the Soviet — a clear breach of the principle of Soviet power. The Bolshevik moderates voted with the opposition against the decree, but it was still passed by two votes in the Soviet Executive. Kamenev resigned as the Chairman of the Soviet Executive and joined the opposition in a concerted effort to defend the sovereignty of the Soviet. But the Leninists pushed on. Sverdlov, who replaced Kamenev, was an ardent advocate of the party dictatorship and faithfully carried out Lenin's instructions to bring it about by centralizing power through Sovnarkom. On 17 November he presented the Soviet Executive with a 'constitutional instruction': while formally reiterating that Sovnarkom was responsible to the Soviet and had to present it with all its legislative acts for approval, it did not specify when this had to be done. Sovnarkom, in other words, could publish a legally binding decree without the prior approval of the Soviet, which increasingly became its practice. On 12 December the Soviet Executive met for the first time in two weeks: during its recess Sovnarkom had begun peace talks with the Central Powers, declared war on the Ukraine and introduced martial law in Petrograd and Moscow. As Sukhanov protested, all these measures had been implemented without discussion in the Soviet. The principle of Soviet power, by which the Bolsheviks claimed their right to rule, had been buried; the Soviet Executive had been reduced to a 'sorry parody of a revolutionary parliament'.⁴⁵

From the first days of the new regime the Bolsheviks had set out to destroy, as 'counter-revolutionaries', all those parties which had opposed the October seizure of power. On 27 October Sovnarkom banned the opposition press. The ban was greeted with outrage. The Bolshevik moderates voted against it in the Soviet Executive on 4 November; the five resignations from the Bolshevik Central Committee that day, followed by an equal number of resignations from

Sovnarkom, were also partly in protest against the ban; while the Printers' Union threatened a national strike unless the freedom of the press was restored. But none of this was enough to prevent the MRC from sending in Bolshevik squads to smash many of the opposition presses, to confiscate their newsprint and arrest their editors. Most of the opposition papers were simply driven underground and soon reappeared with a slightly altered name. The SR paper, Volia naroda, reappeared the next day as Volia, and later on as Narod. The socialist paper, Den' (Day), appeared as Morning, Midday, Afternoon, Evening, Night, Midnight, and so on.⁴⁶

* * * The opposition parties were sustained by the hope of political salvation through the Constituent Assembly. It was surely the true voice of the democracy. Every citizen was represented by it, regardless of class, whereas the Soviets were only representative of the workers, the peasants and the soldiers. The opposition believed that the Constituent Assembly was bound to be recognized as the highest sovereign power in the land: not even the Bolsheviks would dare to challenge that. In fact, the Bolshevik leaders were divided over their policy towards the Assembly, though we still do not know enough about their internal debates on this matter. Lenin had