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

there was in 1921). Moreover, it was clear that drastic measures were needed to restore the railways, which Trotsky, for one, saw as the key to the country's recovery after the devastations of the civil war. In January 1920 he became the Commissar for Transport: it was

the first post he had actually requested. Apart from their chronic disrepair, the railways were dogged by corrupt officials, who were like a broken dam to the flood of bagmen who brought such chaos to the system. Petty localism also paralysed the railways. Every separate branch line formed its own committee and there were dozens of district rail authorities competing with each other for scarce rolling stock. Rather than lose 'their' locomotives to the neighbouring authority they would uncouple them before the train left their jurisdiction, so trains would be held up for hours, sometimes even days, while new locomotives were brought up from the depot of the next authority. Despite the best efforts of the railway staff, it took a whole week for one of Trotsky's senior officials to travel the 300 miles from Odessa to Kromenchug.²

But at the heart of Trotsky's plans there was also a broader vision of the whole of society being run on military lines. Like many Bolsheviks in 1920, Trotsky envisaged the state as the commander of society — mobilizing its resources in accordance with the Plan — just as a General Staff commanded the army. He wanted the economy to be run with military-style discipline and precision. The whole population was to be conscripted into labour regiments and brigades and despatched like soldiers to carry out production orders (couched in terms of 'battles' and 'campaigns') on the economic front. Here was the prototype of the Stalinist command economy. Both were driven by the notion that in a backward peasant country such as Russia state coercion could be used to provide a short-cut to Communism, thus eliminating the need for a long NEP-type stage of capital accumulation through the market. Both were based on the bureaucratic fantasy of imposing Communism by decree (although in each case the result was more akin to feudalism than anything to be found in Marx). As the Mensheviks had once warned, it was impossible to complete the transition towards a socialist economy by using the methods that had been used to build the pyramids.

After its triumphs in the civil war it was no doubt tempting for the Bolsheviks to view the Red Army as a model for the organization of the rest of society. Po voennomy — 'in the army way' — became synonymous with efficiency in the Bolshevik lexicology. If military methods had defeated the Whites, why could they not be used to construct socialism? All that had to be done was to turn around the army so that it marched on the economic front, so every worker became a foot soldier of the planned economy. Trotsky had always argued that factories should be run on military lines.* Now, in the spring of 1920, he outlined this brave new world of Communist labour, where the 'headquarters' of the planned economy would 'send out orders to the labour front' and 'every

* The same idea was expressed at this same time by Gastev and the other pioneers of the Taylor movement in Soviet Russia (see pages 744—5).

evening thousands of telephones would ring at headquarters to report conquests on the labour front.' Trotsky argued that the ability of socialism to conscript forced labour was its main advantage over capitalism. What Soviet Russia lacked in economic development it could make up through the coercive power of the state. It was more effective to compel the workers than it was to stimulate them through the market. Where free labour led to strikes and chaos, state control of the labour market would create discipline and order. This argument was based on the view, which Trotsky shared with Lenin, that the Russians were bad and lazy workers, that they would not work unless driven by the whip. The same view had been held by the Russian gentry under serfdom, a system with which the Soviet regime had much in common. Trotsky extolled the achievements of serf labour and used them to justify his economic plans. He would have no truck with the warnings of his critics that the use of forced labour would be unproductive. 'If this is so,' he told the Congress of Trade Unions in April 1920, 'then you can put a cross over Socialism.'³

At the heart of this 'barracks communism' was the Bolsheviks' fear of the working class as an independent and increasingly rebellious force. Significantly from about this time the Bolsheviks began to talk of the 'workforce' (rabochaia sila or rabsila for short) rather than of the 'working class' (rabocbii klass). The shift implied the transformation of the workers from an active agent of the revolution into a passive object of the party-state. The rabsila was not a class, nor even an assortment of individuals, but simply a mass. The word for a worker (rabochii) was returning to its origins: the word for a slave (rah). Here was the root of the Gulag system — the mentality of dragooning long lines of half-starved and ragged peasants onto building sites and into factories. Trotsky epitomized this when he said that the labour armies were made up from a 'peasant raw material' (muzhitskoe syr'ie). It was the idea that human labour, far from being the creative force which Marx had extolled, was in fact no more than a raw commodity which the state could use up to 'build socialism'. This perversion was implicit in the system from the start. Gorky had foreseen this in 1917 when he wrote that 'the working class is for a Lenin what ore is for a metalworker'.⁴

The experience of the civil war had done nothing to boost the confidence of the Bolshevik leaders in their relationship with the working class. Shortages of food had turned the workers into petty traders and part-time peasants, shuffling between factory and farm. The working class had become nomadic. Industry was reduced to chaos by the constant absence of half the workers on trips to buy food from the countryside. Those in the factories spent most of their time making simple goods to barter with the peasants. Skilled technicians, in high demand, roamed from factory to factory in search of better conditions. Productivity fell to a tiny fraction of pre-revolutionary levels. Even vital munitions plants were brought to a virtual standstill. As the living standards

of the workers fell, strikes and go-slows became common. During the spring of 1919 there was a nationwide outbreak of strikes. Hardly a city was left untouched. Everywhere better food supplies topped the list of strikers' demands. The Bolsheviks answered with repression, arresting and shooting the strikers in their thousands, many of them on suspicion of supporting the Mensheviks.⁵

Without the stimulus of the market, which they still rejected on ideological grounds,* the Bolsheviks had no means to influence the workers apart from the threat of force. They tried to stimulate production by offering key workers high wage bonuses, often linked to piece rates, thus going back on the egalitarian promise of the revolution to eliminate pay differentials. But since the workers could not buy much with paper money this had not given them much incentive. To keep the workers in the factories the Bolsheviks were forced to pay them in kind — either in foodstuffs or in a share of the factory's production which the workers could then use to barter with the peasants. Local Soviets, trade unions and factory boards had bombarded Moscow with requests for permission to pay their workers in this way, and many had done so on their own authority. By 1920 the majority of factory workers were being partly paid in a share of their production. Instead of paper money they were taking home a bag of nails, or a yard of cloth, which they then exchanged for food. Willy-nilly, the primitive market was slowly reappearing at the heart of the planned economy. If this spontaneous movement had been left unchecked, the central administration would have lost its control of the country's resources and thus the power to influence production. So rather than trying to stop the movement, which it had tried but failed to do in 1918—19, it sought instead from 1920 to organize these natural payments, if only to make sure that they went first to the workers in vital industries. This was the basis of the militarization of heavy industry: strategic factories would be placed under martial law, with military discipline on the shopfloor and persistent absentees shot for desertion on the 'industrial front', in exchange for which the workers would be guaranteed a Red Army ration. By the end of the year 3,000 enterprises, mainly in munitions and the mining industry, had been militarized in this way. While soldiers were being turned into workers, workers were being turned into soldiers.

Linked with this was a general shift of power in the factory from the collegiate management boards, which had been partly elected by the workers, to the system of one-man management with managers increasingly appointed by the party hierarchy. Trotsky justified this by comparing it to the transition from

* Trotsky did put forward tentative proposals for an NEP-like market reform in February 1920, but these were turned down by the Central Committee. He swung back at once to the policy of militarization: radical reforms,