the next day by the Third All-Russian Congress of Soviets, and the Soviet government finally removed the word ‘provisional’ from its title.
Looking at the resistance offered by the moderate socialists, one cannot but conclude that they misjudged both the historical situation and the nature of the Bolshevik Party. They all considered the October seizure of power to be an adventurist putsch, morally reprehensible and objectively unjustified by Russia’s social and economic development. They tended to regard the Bolsheviks as misguided comrades who would be taught a lesson both by history and by the Russian people. None of them thought the Bolsheviks could last long in power. For that reason the reaction of most Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks was to keep their moral record clean for the battles of the future by walking out of the soviets and assemblies where the Bolsheviks had just taken control. In that way they more or less capitulated without putting up a fight (though one should note the places, notably Moscow, which were exceptional in this respect). Only belatedly and reluctantly did many of them come to realize that if the Bolsheviks were to be effectively resisted, then it must be by force.
In the long run, some army officers, the liberal parties and many of the Socialist Revolutionaries did come round to the view that it was necessary to fight the Bolsheviks. By that time, however, this meant a civil war in which the Bolsheviks already held many of the advantages.
Even after the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, it was not clear what form of government the Bolsheviks would be able to install, what its relations would be with local soviets as local centres of power, nor what kind of support it would receive from the various sectors of the population. The Bolsheviks had called for ‘All Power to the Soviets’, but Lenin clearly had reservations about that slogan, and the manner in which he had established Sovnarkom did not augur well for the future of decentralized government. The Bolsheviks had also talked a great deal of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ and had called their new government a ‘Workers’ and Peasants’ Government’; but how was the proletariat to put their new-found authority into effect? What was to be the relation between the new centralized institutions of the Soviet government (admittedly as yet largely on paper) and bodies like trade unions and factory committees, which had their own narrower interests to defend?
The Bolsheviks had absolutely no clear answer to these questions. As we have seen, they were divided over how and even whether to seize power.
Even Lenin himself had no clear conception of how he was going to run the enormous, divided, war-torn country. He fully admitted this. Not long before the seizure of power, he said, ‘We do not pretend that Marx or Marxists know the road to socialism in detail. That is nonsense. We know the direction of the road, we know what class forces lead along it, but concretely, practically, this will be shown by the experience of millions when they decide to act.’ He did have a general vision, expounded in State and Revolution, of ordinary workers and peasants taking over the smoothly running mechanism of the imperialist economy. He evoked this vision frequently in the early days of the new regime, in language which mixed democratic voluntarism with ruthless authoritarianism. ‘Comrade workers,’ he exhorted them on 5 November 1917, ‘remember that you yourselves are administering the state. Nobody is going to help you if you do not yourselves unite and take over all state affairs. Rally round your soviets: make them strong. Get to work right there, at the grass roots, without waiting for orders. Institute the strictest revolutionary order, suppress without mercy the anarchic excesses of drunken hooligans, counterrevolutionary cadets [yunkera], Kornilovites, etc. Institute rigorous supervision over production and accounting over products. Arrest and deliver to the tribunal of the revolutionary people whoever dares to raise his hand against the people’s cause.’ This was the language of the utopian, confident that he is already on the threshold of the ideal society.
Some of the very early Bolshevik legislation did seem to be putting this vision into practice by creating or strengthening institutions through which workers, peasants and soldiers could gain greater control over their own fate and also over the running of the country.
1. The land decree of 26 October 1917 abolished all private landownership without compensation, and called on village and volost (rural district) land committees to redistribute the land thus secured to the peasants on an egalitarian basis. The decree was couched in the words of a Peasant Congress of June 1917. It reflected the Socialist Revolutionary programme and gave the peasants what most of them wanted at the time, while making no mention of the ultimate Bolshevik aim of nationalization of the land.
2. The decree of 14 November 1917 on workers’ control gave elected factory committees the power of supervision (kontrol) over industrial and commercial enterprises, for which purpose commercial secrecy was to be abolished.
3. Decrees of November and December 1917 abolished all ranks, insignia and hierarchical greetings in the army and subordinated all military formations to elected committees of soldiers, among whose duties would be the election of their officers.
4. Existing judicial institutions were replaced, in a decree of 22 November 1917, by ‘people’s courts’, whose judges would be elected by the working population. Special revolutionary tribunals were to be elected forthwith by the soviets to deal with counterrevolutionary activity, profiteering, speculation and sabotage.
On the other hand, some of the Bolsheviks’ very earliest measures pointed in the other direction, towards tighter central authority. On 2 December 1917 a Supreme Council of the National Economy was set up, almost universally known by its initials, VSNKh (or Vesenkha), to ‘elaborate general norms and a plan for regulating the economic life of the country’ as well as to ‘reconcile and coordinate’ the activities of other economic agencies, among them the trade unions and factory committees. In January 1918 the factory committees were converted into local branches of the trade unions, and the whole structure subordinated to Vesenkha. This was not necessarily done against the wishes of the workers themselves: indeed there is a good deal of evidence that, to keep production going at all in the desperately difficult economic circumstances, many factory committees were only too glad to seek support from some larger entity. Nevertheless, in practice it meant that the economy was becoming very centralized even before the civil war broke out.
The same was true of the decision to set up the Cheka — or, to give it its full name, the Extraordinary Commission for Struggle with Counterrevolution and Sabotage — instituted by Sovnarkom on 7 December 1917. Its immediate task was to combat looting, hooliganism and black market trading, which had increased alarmingly, and to keep watch on organizations known to be opposed to the Bolsheviks. In its early appeals it tried to mobilize the population in the same style as Lenin: ‘The Commission appeals to all workers, soldiers and peasants to come to its aid in the struggle with enemies of the Revolution. Send all news and facts about organizations and individual persons whose activity is harmful to the Revolution and the people’s power to the Commission …’ In practice, the Cheka was never subordinated to any soviet institution, nor indeed to any party body, only to Sovnarkom, and was able to extend its powers unchecked.
Another source of uncertainty about the new Soviet regime was its relation to the outside world. Lenin had encouraged the seizure of power in the expectation that its example would provoke workers’ revolutions in other countries of Europe, especially in Germany. As the months passed and this did not happen, it became clear that the Bolsheviks were going to have to honour their pledge to end the war, not through negotiations with a friendly, socialist Germany, but by reaching some kind of agreement with the old imperial Germany. Given the weakness of the Russian army, which the Bolsheviks themselves had fostered, this could only mean acceptance of whatever terms the German generals cared to dictate. Trotsky, as the newly appointed commissar for foreign affairs, tried to put the new-style ‘public diplomacy’ into effect by addressing the German people directly over the heads of their leaders, but his words produced no immediate effect.
The dilemma of how to deal with this