A People's Tragedy (96 page)

What the workers saw in Soviet power, above all, was the chance to control their own factory environment. They wanted to regulate their own shop-floor relations, to set their own wages and working conditions, and combat the 'sabotage', the conspiratorial running-down of production by profit-conscious employers, which many workers blamed for the industrial crisis. In this heightened atmosphere of class war, impatience was growing with the Mensheviks' leadership of the labour movement: their policies of mediating labour disputes and conciliating the employers had failed to stop the rising tide of unemployment. Many workers, especially those under the influence of the Bolsheviks, saw the solution in the sequestration (or nationalization) of their factory by a Workers' State, called 'Soviet Power', which would then set up a management board of workers, technicians and Soviet officials to keep the factory running.* It was part of the growing political consciousness of the workers, the realization that their demands could only be achieved by changing the nature of the state itself.

* This was roughly the import of the Bolshevik Decree on Workers' Control passed on 14 November.

This politicization became manifest in the dramatic upsurge of strikes which crippled the country from September onwards. Because of the general effects of inflation, it was far more widespread than previous strike-waves: unskilled labourers and semi-intelligentsia groups, such as hospital, city and clerical workers, were forced to cast aside their usual reluctance to strike in the struggle to keep up with the rising cost of living. Yet because strikes were ineffective — and even counter-productive — in combating inflation, they were often accompanied by broader political demands for the whole economy to be restructured. Industrial strikes, still the most common, were also much more likely to end up in violence. They were no less than a battle for the control of the workplace and the city economy as a whole. The trade unions and factory committees, which tended to have a moderating influence, soon lost control of these militant strikes. They spilled on to the streets and sometimes even ended in bloody conflicts between the workers — armed, trained and organized by the Red Guards —

and the government militias. Employers and managers were assaulted; and where they resorted to lock-outs, the factory buildings were stormed and occupied by the workers.

Some strikes spread to involve the residents of whole urban districts in attacks on bakeries and shops, house searches and arrests of the
burzboois
whom the crowd suspected of hoarding food. There was also a steep rise in looting and crime, drunkenness and vandalism, ethnic conflicts and anti-Jewish pogroms during September and October.93 To the urban propertied classes, these final weeks before the Bolshevik seizure of power appeared like a descent into anarchy.

September also saw a violent upturn in the peasant war against the landed estates. With the approach of the autumn ploughing, the time seemed ripe for a final reckoning with the old agrarian order. The peasants were fed up with waiting for the Provisional Government to deliver on its promises about the land, and most villages now had their own band of soldiers from the army ready to lead them in the march on the manors. The pogrom, or violent sacking of an estate by the mob, became a widespread phenomenon in the central black-soil regions, whereas in previous months the peasant movement had been mainly confined to disputes over rent, the confiscation of cattle and the organized seizure of the arable fields by the village committee. In Tambov province hundreds of manor houses were burned and vandalized — the aim ostensibly being, as the peasants put it, to 'drive the squires out'. This violent wave of destruction seems to have started with the murder of Prince Boris Vyazemsky, the owner of several thousand hectares in the Usman region of Tambov. The local peasants had been demanding since the spring that Vyazemsky lower his rents and return the hundred hectares of prime pasture he had taken from them as a punishment for their part in the revolution of 1905. But on both counts Vyazemsky had refused. On 24 August some 5,000 peasants from the neighbouring villages

occupied the estate. Fortified by vodka from the Prince's cellars, and armed with pitchforks and rifles, they repulsed a Cossack detachment, arrested Vyazemsky and organized a kangaroo court which decided to despatch him to the Front, so that he can learn to fight as the peasants have done'. But there were also cries of 'Let's kill the Prince, we are sick of him!', and he was murdered by the drunken mob before he even reached the nearby railway station. Vyazemsky's manor house was then destroyed, the livestock and tools divided up and carted back to the villages, and his arable land ploughed by the peasants.94

Similar pogroms followed on dozens of other estates, not only in Tambov but also in the neighbouring provinces of Penza, Voronezh, Saratov, Kazan, Orel, Tula and Riazan'. In Penza province some 250 manors (one-fifth of the total) were burned or destroyed in September and October alone. One agronomist left a vivid description of the plundered estates in Saratov province during the autumn of 1917:

As far as the manor buildings are concerned, they have been senselessly destroyed, with only the walls left standing. The windows and doors were the worst to suffer; in the majority of the estates no trace is left of them. All forms of transport have been destroyed or taken. Cumbersome machines like steam-threshers, locomotives, and binders were taken out for no known reason and discarded along the roads and in the fields. The agricultural tools were also taken. Anything that could be used in the peasant households simply disappeared from the estates.

Not even Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy's estate in Tula, escaped the wrath of the peasants he had once idolized. Sonya, Tolstoy's widow, who was now old and blind, cabled Kerensky for help, while her daughters packed their father's books and manuscripts into wooden boxes and piled them up in the salon, where they waited in darkness for the plundering mob to come. They had armed themselves with knives and hammers to fight for their lives if need be. But the marauding peasants, seeing the house unlit, assumed it had already been destroyed and moved on to the next estate.95

This final reckoning with the squires usually took place at the same time as the establishment of the Soviet in the village or the volost township. The peasants saw the Soviets as the realization of their long-cherished
volia,
the direct self-rule of their villages free from the intervention of the gentry or the state. The village Soviets were really no more than the communes in a more revolutionary form. The Soviet assembly was indistinguishable from the open gathering of the communal
skhod,
except perhaps that the white-bearded patriarchs were now overshadowed by the younger and more literate peasants, such as Semenov, who helped to establish the Soviet in Andreevskoe.

The peasant Soviets

often behaved like village republics, paying scant regard to the orders of the central state. Many of them employed their own police forces and set up their own courts, while some even had their own flags and emblems. Nearly all of them had their own volunteer militia, or Red Guard, organized by the younger peasants straight out of the army to defend the revolutionary village and its borders.96

* * * The mass of workers and peasants were moving inexorably towards their own localist conceptions of Soviet rule. Only a Soviet government could hope to command any real authority in the country at large. This had been the case since the February Revolution. But time and again the Soviet leaders had chosen to ignore it — their dogmatic faith in the need for a 'bourgeois stage of the revolution' had tied them to the hopeless task of trying to keep the coalition going — and every time the streets had arisen to the cry of Soviet power they had chosen to cover their ears. And yet at last, in the wake of the Kornilov crisis, it seemed that the moment had come for the socialist parties to make the decisive break and form a government of their own. The Kadets, the major bourgeois partner of the coalition, had been thoroughly discredited by their support for the 'counter-revolutionary' general; while the socialist parties were being pulled by their own rank-and-file supporters towards Soviet power. The possibility was beginning to emerge during the first half of September that all the major socialist parties, from the Popular Socialists on the right to the Bolsheviks on the left, might come together for the formation of a government based exclusively on the Soviets and the other democratic organizations. It was a unique historical moment, a fleeting chance for the revolution to follow a different course from the one that it did. If this opportunity had been taken, Russia might have become a socialist democracy rather than a Communist dictatorship; and, as a result, the bloody civil war — which by the autumn of 1917 was probably inevitable — might have lasted weeks instead of years.

The three main Soviet parties were all moving towards the idea of a socialist government, or at least a decisive break with the bourgeoisie, in the weeks following the Kornilov crisis. Martov's left-wing Menshevik faction, which favoured an all-socialist government, was steadily gaining supporters among the rank and file of the party.

Under their pressure, the Menshevik Central Committee pledged itself to the formation of a 'homogenous democratic government' on I September. The Left SRs were also gaining ground, effectively emerging as a separate party after the crisis. Their three major policies — a socialist government based on the Soviet, the immediate confiscation of the gentry's estates and an end to the war — could not have been better tailored to suit the demands of the SR rank and file, the mass of the peasants and soldiers, though such was their disillusionment with Kerensky and Chernov that many of them

abandoned the SRs altogether and moved directly to the Bolsheviks. The provincial Soviet in Saratov, home of the SRs, went Bolshevik during September.97

The Bolsheviks were also coming round to the idea of a socialist coalition based on the Soviets. Kamenev of course had always been in favour of this. He had been fighting all along to keep the Bolshevik campaign within the Soviet movement and the democratic institutions of the February Revolution. As he saw it, the country was not ripe for a Bolshevik uprising, and any attempt to stage one was bound to end in civil war and the defeat of the party. It would be the Paris Commune all over again. In his view the Bolsheviks had no choice but to continue with the strategy of trying to win support in the Soviets, in the city Dumas, and eventually in the Constituent Assembly through democratic elections. They also had to persuade the Mensheviks and SRs to break with the coalition and join them in a socialist government.

Until the Kornilov crisis, Lenin had been flatly opposed to the idea of any compromise with the Soviet leaders. After the July Days he had given up all hope of coming to power through the Soviets: as he saw it, the Provisional Government had been captured by a 'military dictatorship' engaged in a 'civil war' against the proletariat; the Soviets had lost their revolutionary potential and were being led, 'like sheep to the abattoir', by a group of leaders bent on appeasing the 'counter-revolution'. The only option left was to give up the slogan All Power to the Soviets!' and stage an armed uprising to transfer power to the rival proletarian organs under the leadership of the Bolshevik Party. It was revealing of Lenin's attitude towards the Soviets, in whose name his regime was to be founded, that whenever they failed to serve the interests of his party, he was ready to ditch them. It is quite mistaken to argue, as Isaac Deutscher once did, that Lenin was planning to make the Soviet Congress the constitutional source of sovereign power, like the English House of Commons, with the Bolsheviks ruling through this congress in the manner of a Western parliamentary party* Lenin was no Soviet constitutionalist — and all his actions after October testified to this. The Soviets, in his schema, were always to be subordinated to the party. Even in
The State and Revolution
— supposedly his most

'libertarian' work of political theory, which he completed at this time — Lenin stressed the need for a strong and repressive party state, a Dictatorship of the Proletariat, during the period of transition to the Communist Utopia when the 'bourgeois state' was to be smashed. He barely mentioned the Soviets at all.98

Yet, in the wake of the Kornilov crisis, which had seen the Soviet leaders

* It is interesting how many Marxists of Deutscher's generation (E. H. Carr immediately comes to mind) were inclined to see the Western democratic system as inherently authoritarian and the Soviet regime as inherently democratic. For Deutscher's comments on Lenin's 'Soviet constitutionalism' see
The Prophet Armed,
290-1.

move to the left, even Lenin was prepared to consider the idea of a compromise with them. Not that he gave up his ultimate aim of a Bolshevik dictatorship. 'Our party', he assured its left wing on I September in his article 'On Compromises', 'is striving after political domination
for itself.'
But the leftward move of the Soviets, which worked to the benefit of the party, opened up the prospect of moving once again towards Soviet power through peaceful means. The Bolsheviks, after all, were now likely to be a dominant force in any government based on the Soviets — and it was this that enabled Lenin to consider what, in essence, as he put it, would be 'our return to the pre-July demand of all power to the Soviets'. During the fortnight leading up to the opening of the Democratic Conference, on 14 September, when the power question was to be resolved, Lenin supported Kamenev's efforts to persuade the Mensheviks and SRs to break with the coalition and join the Bolsheviks in a socialist government based on the Soviets. If the Soviet leaders agreed to assume power, the Bolsheviks would give up their campaign for an armed uprising and compete for power within the Soviet movement itself. But Lenin's implication remained clear: if the Soviet leaders refused to do this, the party should prepare for the seizure of power."

The fate of Russia thus depended on the actions of the Soviet leaders at the Democratic Conference. This was the moment when their national leadership was put to the crucial test — and was found wanting. The Conference took place in the Alexandrinsky Theatre, which proved a suitable venue since the meeting ended in farce. Three clear political groupings immediately became apparent: the Right, which favoured a coalition with the Kadets; the Centre, which favoured a coalition with the bourgeoisie but without the Kadets; and the Left, which supported a socialist government, either based on the Soviets or more broadly on the democratic groups represented at the conference. But when it came to the vote there was total confusion. To begin with, the conference passed a resolution (by 766 votes to 688) supporting the general principle of a coalition with the bourgeoisie. But then it passed two further amendments excluding the Kadets from such a coalition. This so angered the Right that they then sided with the Left in a second vote on the original resolution and defeated it by 813 votes to 183. After four days of debate the conference had ended without an opinion on the vital issue for which it had been called. This was neither the first nor the last time in the brief and interrupted history of the Russian democratic movement that the basic skills of parliamentary decisionmaking proved beyond its leaders; but it was perhaps the most critical in terms of its consequences.