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

centralized forms of Soviet control.

Following the Eighth Party Congress in March the central party apparatus was built up in preparation to take over control of the Soviets. A five-man Politburo was established (Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Kamenev and Krestinsky) to

decide party policy. The staff of the Central Committee was increased five-fold during the course of the following year, with nine departments and various bureaux appended to it to formulate policies in various areas, together with a Party Secretariat and a special Organizational Bureau (Orgburo) to allocate party forces throughout the country. A strict centralism was imposed on the local party cells: their members were now told to carry out the orders of the higher party bodies rather than those of the Soviets. Since the chairmen of the local Soviets were invariably party members — and often the chairman of the local party cell — this effectively subordinated the whole of the Soviet apparatus to the party. The Bolsheviks began to talk of the Soviets and other public bodies, such as the trade unions, as 'transmission belts' of party rule. It was a phrase that Stalin would make famous.

The higher party organs tended increasingly to appoint their own special commissars to Soviet positions hitherto elected from below. By 1920, the Central Committee was making about 1,000 such postings a month. The provincial party organs made similar postings at the district and volost level. Os'kin's in Tula was one of the most notorious practitioners of this 'appointmentism'. Its aim was to increase the Centre's control over the local apparatus by sending down its most loyal and trusted comrades to take command of it in military style. But this was sometimes counter-productive. The roaming commissars were prone to alienate the local activists by riding roughshod over their interests. This gave rise to growing protests among the Bolshevik rank and file against the party's 'militarization', which resulted in the atrophy of the local party organizations and their alienation from the leadership. Perhaps even more importantly, the frequent use of such appointments also meant that many Soviets were ruled by party bosses wholly alien to the local region and thus perhaps more inclined to the abuse of power. Semen Kanatchikov was a typical representative of this nomadic commissar class. Although a native of Moscow province, he was appointed by the Central Committee to senior posts in Tomsk, Perm, Sverdlovsk, Omsk, the Tatar Republic and Petrograd during the course of the civil war. For nearly two years, he did not see his wife and two little children, whom he left in hiding in Barnaul. This 'appointmentism' could only add to the growing sense, both among the people and the party rank and file, that Soviet power was something alien and oppressive.⁵⁶

* * * Not surprisingly for a party-state that aimed to control the whole of society, the Soviet bureaucracy ballooned spectacularly during the first years of Bolshevik rule. Whereas the tsarist state had left much in the hands of private and public institutions, such as the zemstvos and the charities, the Soviet regime abolished all of these and assumed direct responsibility for the activities which they had performed. The result was the bureaucratization of virtually every aspect of life

in Russia, from banking and industry to education. From 1917 to 1921 the number of government employees more than quadrupled, from 576,000 to 2.4 million. By 1921, there were twice as many bureaucrats as workers in Russia. They were the social base of the regime. This was not a Dictatorship of the Proletariat but a Dictatorship of the Bureaucracy. Moscow, in Lenin's words, was 'bloated with officials': it housed nearly a quarter of a million of them, one-third of the total workforce in the city by the end of 1920. The centre of Moscow became one vast block of offices, as committees were piled on top of councils and departments on top of commissions.⁵⁷

Perhaps a third of the bureaucracy was employed in the regulation of the planned economy. It was an absurd situation: while the economy came to a standstill, its bureaucracy flourished. The country was desperately short of fuel but there was an army of bureaucrats to regulate its almost non-existent distribution. There was no paper in the shops but a mountain of it in the Soviet offices (90 per cent of the paper made in Russia during the first four years of Soviet rule was consumed by the bureaucracy). One of the few really busy factories was the Moscow Telephone Factory. Such was the demand of this new officialdom for telephones that it had a waiting list of 12,000 orders.⁵⁸

This correlation — empty factories and full offices — was not accidental. The scarcer goods were, the harder it became to control their distribution, since the black market thrived on shortages, so that the state increased its intervention. The result was the proliferation of overlapping offices within the economy. Apart from the central commissariats (e.g. food, labour, transport) and their local organs in the Soviets, there was the network of organs subordinate to the VSNKh, the All-Russian Council for the Economy, including its local economic councils, the manufacturing trusts and the special departments for the regulation of individual commodities (Glavki). Then there were also the ad hoc agencies set up by the regime for military supply, like the Council of Labour and Defence or such acronymic monsters as Chusosnabarm (the Extraordinary Agency for the Supply of the Army), which in principle could over-rule the other economic organs. Of course, in practice, there was only confusion and rivalry between the different organs. The more the state tried to centralize control, the less real control it actually had. Lower down the scale, at factory level, the bureaucracy proved just as ineffective. For every 100 factory workers there were 16 factory officials by 1920. In some factories the figure was much higher: of the 7,000 people employed at the famous Putilov metal plant, only 2,000 were blue-collar workers; the rest were petty officials and clerks. Such were the material advantages of a white-collar job, not least access to food and goods in short supply, that such parasites were bound to grow in number as the economic crisis deepened. All the strike resolutions of these years complained about factory officials 'living off the backs of the workers'.⁵⁹

Lenin liked to claim that the problem of bureaucratism was a legacy of the tsarist era. It is true that the Soviet bureaucracy inherited the culture of the tsarist one. But by 1921 it was also ten times bigger than the tsarist state. There was some continuity of the personnel, especially in the central organs of the state. Over half the bureaucrats in the Moscow offices of the commissariats in August 1918 had worked in some branch of the administration before October 1917. Many of the central organs also employed armies of young bourgeois ladies, most of whom had never worked before, to do the petty paper work. One eye- witness recalls them walking by their hundreds every morning through the snow from the Moscow suburbs to the centre of the city. There they worked all day in unheated offices, their wet shoes and clothes never drying out, before walking back to the suburbs to help feed their hungry relatives. Otherwise, however, the lower you went down the apparatus the more it was dominated by the lower classes entering officialdom for the first time. The majority of these elements, especially in provincial towns, came from the lower-middle classes — what Marxists called the 'petty bourgeoisie': bookkeepers, shop assistants and petty clerks; small-time traders and artisans; activists of the co-operatives; engineers and factory officials; and all those who might have once worked as technicians or professionals in the zemstvos and municipal organs. As for the workers, in whose name the regime had been founded, they represented a very small proportion of those who entered the Soviet bureaucracy: certainly no more than 10 per cent (based on those with blue-collar occupations before 1917). Even in the management of industry workers made up less than one-third of officials. It is reasonable to conclude that most of these lower- middle strata were attracted to the Soviet regime less by their own revolutionary ideals than by the relatively high wages and short working-hours of its officials. It was certainly a more attractive prospect than the cold and hunger that awaited those from the older bourgeoisie who chose instead to turn their backs on it. The typical day of a Soviet official was spent gossiping in corridors, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee, or standing in queues for the special rations that went only to the Soviet elite.⁶⁰

In the countryside the influence of the Soviet regime penetrated further than the tsarist had. During the civil war the majority of the Soviet executives at volost level were transformed from democratic organs of peasant revolution into bureaucratic organs of state taxation. In the Volga region, where this process has been studied, 71 per cent of the volost Soviet executives had at least one Bolshevik member by the autumn of 1919, compared with only 38 per cent in the previous spring. Two-thirds of all the executive members were registered as Bolsheviks. This gave the regime a foothold in the volost townships: in the volost Soviet executives, which like their counterparts at the higher level concentrated power in their own hands at the expense of the Soviet congress, the Bolsheviks could count on a more or less reliable body to enforce the food levies

and mobilizations. Having lost control of the Soviet, the peasants retreated to their villages, rallied round their communes and turned their backs on the volost Soviet. The growing conflict between the peasantry and party-state was thus fought on the