John Medhurst - No Less Than Mystic - A History of Lenin and the Russian Revolution for a 21st-Century Left

The army outside Petrograd was not as infiltrated by Bolsheviks as the garrison in the capital. Kerensky still claimed to be the head of the legitimate government, and he ordered General Krasnov to attack Petrograd. The first military engagement of the Bolshevik Revolution took place on 27th October at Gatchina. In heavy fighting MRC units were pushed back, but over the next few days Bolshevik agitators moved through Krasnov’s men and encouraged them to desert. When Krasnov’s depleted forces then pushed on to Polkovo, just outside Petrograd, they were defeated by MRC troops. This bought time for the Bolsheviks to establish their new government and issue vitally important Decrees on land redistribution, peace and workers’ control.

The new government already had a structure. The first sitting of the Second Congress closed at 5am on 26th October to enable exhausted delegates to rest. Its second session opened that evening. It was in this session, now without delegates who had supported the Right SRs and the Mensheviks, that crucial decisions were taken about the organisation of the government. Its most important and historic decision was to authorise the creation of a “Council of People’s Commissars”, to be known as Sovnarcom.

At this stage of the revolution, with the Bolshevik Party still seeking Soviet legitimacy for its assumption of power, it was Sovnarcom, not the Bolshevik Central Committee or its Politburo, that sat at the apex of government. Lenin was Chair of the Council. Leading Bolsheviks took specific departmental responsibilities such as Interior (Rykov), Agriculture (Miliutin), Labour (Shliapnikov), Commerce and Industry (Nogin), Education (Lunacharsky), Foreign Affairs (Trotsky), Justice (Lomov), Social Welfare (Kollontai) and Nationalities (Stalin). The departments followed those of the Tsarist and Provisional Governments almost exactly. There had been no “smashing of the existing state machine”, nor was this ever proposed. The Decree establishing Sovnarcom declared:

For the administration of the country up to the convening of the Constituent Assembly, a temporary Worker and Peasant government is to be formed, which will be named the Council of People’s Commissars. Charge of particular branches of state life are entrusted to Commissions, the composition of which should ensure the carrying into life of the programme proclaimed by the Congress in close unity with the mass organizations of working men and women, sailors, soldiers, peasants and office workers. Governmental power belongs to the collegiums of chairmen of these commissions, i.e. the Council of People’s Commissars. Control over the activity of the of the People’s Commissars and the right of replacing them belongs to the All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers’, Peasants’ and Soldiers’ Deputies and its Central Executive Committee. 6

T.H. Rigby’s definitive study of Sovnarcom’s administrative machine from 1917-22 found that there was no internal debate or discussion in the Bolshevik Party about how exactly this structure would work, or how accountable the People’s Commissars would be to the Soviets and the Soviet Congress. In reality no People’s Commissar was ever replaced by the Congress of Soviets or its Executive.

Sovnarcom’s first proclamations were progressive and emancipatory. The Decree on Peace called on “all belligerent peoples and their governments to start immediately negotiations for a just and democratic peace”. It explained that “by such a peace the government means an immediate peace without annexations and without indemnities”. Thus far the Decree did not go further than the Left Mensheviks and SRs, even those like Dan and Chernov who had supported the Provisional Government. But it went on, “the government announces its determination immediately to sign terms of peace to stop this war on the terms indicated, which are equally just for all nationalities without exceptions”. This was a new departure and signaled the Bolsheviks’ willingness, driven by recognition that the Russian people would not carry on the war, to sign a peace deal without the quid-proquo of detailed peace negotiations. As a sign of the new era it added that it intended to publish all the secret accords and treaties agreed by previous Russian governments, as well as the “immediate annulment” of any terms in the treaties that secured advantages for Russian landowners and “the retention, or extension, of the annexations made by Great Russia”.

The Decree on Land, drafted by Lenin personally, was issued on the same day. Its first proclamation read:

Private ownership of land shall be abolished forever; land shall not be sold, purchased, leased, mortgaged or otherwise alienated. All land, whether state, crown, monastery, church, factory, entailed, private, public, peasant, etc., shall be confiscated without compensation and become the property of the whole people.

After reserving “high level scientific farms” for use as “model farms”, it said:

The right to use the land shall be accorded to all citizens of the Russian state (without distinction of sex) desiring to cultivate it by their own labour, with the help of their families or in partnership, but only as long as they are able to cultivate it. The employment of hired labour is not permitted.

The Land Decree shamelessly stole the agrarian programme of the SRs, which the Provisional Government had been attempting to implement in gradual stages, and offered it wholesale to the peasants. In the excitement few of them noticed that the Decree did not actually confer personal land ownership. It spoke of social ownership to be run by local authorities. For most peasants this meant the Zemstvos having general oversight, with peasants owning and disposing as they wished of their parcels of land. Few peasants paid heed to Lenin’s qualification that the provisions of the Decree were to be implemented immediately “as far as possible”, but “in regard to certain of its parts with such necessary gradualness as the county peasant Soviets shall determine”. Lenin anticipated that peasant Soviets not under the control of the Bolsheviks soon would be, and they would then set the pace and the scale of peasant landownership. It was not clear what would happen if rural Soviets stayed under the control of the SRs.

Further decrees had to await the result of fighting outside Petrograd and in Moscow. It was not until 2nd November that Sovnarcom issued a decree on the Rights of the Peoples of Russia, which granted equality and sovereignty to all peoples of the Empire, their right to self-determination up to secession and formation of independent states, and full civil and cultural freedoms for ethnic groups.

On 14th November Sovnarcom published the Decree on Workers’ Control, one of the most misunderstood and contentious of the many declarations of the new regime. It began:

In order to provide planned regulation of the national economy, workers’control over the manufacture, purchase, sale and storage of produce and of raw materials, and over the financial activity of enterprises is introduced in all industrial, commercial, banking, agricultural, cooperative, and other enterprises which employ hired labour or give work to be done at home.

The Decree defined workers’ control as “exercised by all the workers of the given enterprise through their elected bodies, such as factory committees, shop stewards councils etc.”. 7

In Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power? (published on 1st October), Lenin had made clear he regarded “workers’control” as dependent on the nature of the government conferring it. “When we say workers’control”, he wrote,

always associating that slogan with the dictatorship of the proletariat, and always putting it after the latter, we thereby make plain what state we have in mind. If it is a proletarian state we are referring to, then workers’control can become a national, all-embracing, omni-present, extremely precise and extremely scrupulous accounting of the production and distribution of goods.