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

Lenin and Trotsky themselves led the opposition to Larin’s resolution. “You say that we demanded freedom of the press for Pravda ”, Trotsky told delegates who criticised the Bolsheviks for a volte face on freedom of the press. “But then we were in a situation where we demanded the Minimum Programme. Now we demand the Maximum Programme. When the state power was in the hands of the bourgeoisie we stood for legal freedom of the press”. Lenin added, “We stated earlier that if we took power we would close down bourgeois newspapers. To allow them to exist is to cease to be socialists”. 22Larin’s resolution lost by 31 votes to 22. The Bolshevik resolution supporting restrictions on the press passed by 34 votes to 24.

After the resolution was passed the Left SR Prosyhan made a declaration on behalf of the Left SR party:

The resolution on the press passed by the majority of the CEC is a clear and unambiguous expression of support for a system of political terror and for unleashing civil war. The SR fraction, while remaining in the CEC […] has no desire to bear any responsibility for this system of terror, ruinous for the revolution, and therefore withdraws all representatives from the Military Revolutionary Committee, the staff, and all responsible posts.

With Proshyan’s words ringing in the air, People’s Commissar for Trade and Industry Nogin asked to be given the floor to read an urgent statement on behalf of a group of four of Sovnarcom’s People’s Commissars: himself, Commissar for Internal Affairs Rykov, Commissar for Agriculture Miliutin and Commissar for Supply Teodorovich.

He read out:

We take the stand that it is vital to form a socialist government from all parties represented in the Soviets. Only such a government can seal the heroic struggle of the working class and revolutionary army in the October-November days. We consider that a purely Bolshevik government has no choice but to maintain itself by political terror. This is the course on which Sovnarcom is embarked. We cannot follow this course, which will lead to the proletarian mass organizations becoming estranged from those who direct our political affairs, to the establishment of an irresponsible government, and to the annihilation of the revolution and the country.

The four People’s Commissars therefore resigned from Sovnarcom. Their statement was officially “adhered to” by Riazanov and other leading Bolsheviks. People’s Commissar for Labour Alexander Shliapnikov added that while he agreed with the statement he felt it was “impermissible to lay down my responsibilities”. 23Kamenev also resigned as Chair of the CEC.

It was a crucial moment. If Kamenev, Rykov and the Bolshevik “moderates” had won out, the October Insurrection might have delivered power to the Soviets instead of to the Bolshevik Party. As it was, Sovnarcom took power and never relinquished it. Central to that power was a Decree titled “Concerning the Procedure for the Ratification and Promulgation of Laws”, which gave Sovnarcom the right to act in a legislative capacity. The unilateral assumption of both executive and legislative power sidelined the CEC and the Soviets and reversed the entire rationale of the October Insurrection. When Lenin and Trotsky were summoned by the CEC and asked to explain, Lenin simply said he rejected “bourgeois formalism”. Trotsky, developing this theme, claimed that Sovnarcom could issue legislation because Sovnarcom and the masses were linked by “a vital and direct bond”, although he did not explain how the vital and direct bond actually functioned. 24

Public division between the Soviet and Sovnarcom called the entire basis of the Bolshevik insurrection into question. Two things came to Lenin’s rescue. Firstly, the new regime was mobilising large numbers of volunteers to fight Krasnov’s forces. People had died for it. This gave it enormous credibility. Secondly, Lenin’s opponents played their cards badly. His critics within the Bolshevik Party resigned from key positions just when they could have used them to hold him to account. The Left SRs had just broken with the main SRs and as yet had no real organisation or structure. When they formed their own party they needed Bolshevik support to survive. Despite their protests about Sovnarcom they were tempted to join it in junior positions. This both defused their criticisms and enabled Lenin to claim that Sovnarcom was, after all, a socialist coalition government.

The Mensheviks were not tempted. Between February and October 1917 they appeared to lose their political bearings. Some of this was due to Martov’s absence until May 1917 and the dominance of the forceful but conservative Tseretelli. At their best they had stood for political liberty, civil rights and a controlled expansion of public ownership–although the Provisional Government’s endorsement of the Volosts ’ seizure of landed estates and attempt to provide communal oversight of the redistributed land came from Chernov and the SRs. At their worst they slipped into support for imperialist war aims and a centralised capitalist economy, if with added trade union engagement.

After the October Insurrection and Martov’s renewed command of the party, the Mensheviks rediscovered their radical spirit. Even before October leading Mensheviks like Theodore Dan were attacking Kerensky from the left. At the Extraordinary Congress of the Menshevik party held on 4th December, Dan and Tseretelli acknowledged their mistakes when in office and Dan supported Martov for leader. The Congress elected a new Menshevik Central Committee in which Left Mensheviks predominated. Martov now took the mantle of undisputed Menshevik leader.

Martov understood why the urban working class had switched from Menshevism, so powerful in February, to Bolshevism, but he also sensed that this support was for Soviet power and not for one-party dictatorship. He broadly supported Sovnarcom’s early Decrees although he tried, through the Vikzhel negotiations, to establish Sovnarcom as a Soviet government, accountable to the Soviet Executive and Congress. At the Extraordinary Congress, Martov proposed a programme for the Mensheviks that repeated his line at the Vikzhel talks, i.e. for a socialist coalition government answerable to a Central Council consisting of representatives of the Soviets, the trade unions, and urban and rural local government. Whilst the Mensheviks refused to enter a government that did not implement a democratic programme they refused to support the violent overthrow of the Bolshevik government. It was this programme that they intended to put before the Soviets in the early months of 1918.

By January 1918, with most of their opponents’ newspapers suppressed, the Bolsheviks had secured a massive majority on the Soviet CEC, which reduced it to a rubber stamp for Sovnarcom’s policies. If democratic mechanisms had existed to alter the balance of forces on the Executive–i.e. free and fair elections in which other parties could attain a majority and thus, in theory, create a new Sovnarcom–that need not have been a permanent problem. But these mechanisms were being phased out. The first “purge” of Bolshevik dissenters in early November and the subsequent wide use of governmental decrees demonstrated that Sovnarcom was not about to share power.

In the immediate aftermath of 25th October, the State Bank and Treasury refused to recognise Sovnarcom. Civil servants in all ministries went on strike to protest the imposition of a government whose mandate they did not accept. The People’s Commissar for Finance, Menzhinsky, was reduced to arriving at the State Bank with armed soldiers and demanding the transfer of ten million rubles to the government. Even when Sovnarcom established control of the Bank it had very little idea how to run it. Contrary to The State and Revolution , it turned out that ordinary workers and peasants could not take over the existing organs of the state and run them without some level of training and specialist knowledge. Nor could they “smash” them without a viable alternative to put in their place. It took Sovnarcom several weeks to break this resistance. The leaders of the civil-service strike were arrested and imprisoned. Junior civil servants were promoted to follow Sovnarcom’s orders and the banks began to print money as instructed. The immediate threat of a complete stoppage of government services had been averted.