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

This was the most important development on the German political scene during the war. The Spartacists knew it–they worked within the USPD as it represented the most radical elements of the German working class. The Bolsheviks, however, condemned the USPD as much as the SPD and pinned their hopes on the Spartacists alone. This totally misinterpreted German politics. The SPD was still the main workers’ party. Although there was little chance of a revolutionary overthrow of the German state, this did not preclude the capture of the state by the SPD or USPD in the event of Germany’s defeat in the war and the formation of a democratic republic. This was as far as most German workers wished to go, leaving the Bolsheviks, as Kamenev and Zinoviev had predicted prior to October 1917, isolated.

Lenin was beginning to sense this. By early 1918 he was urging acceptance of whatever annexationist peace was available rather than take what he called a “blind gamble” on imminent European revolution. Trotsky, at Brest-Litovsk, took a position of “neither war nor peace”, i.e. Russia should simply withdraw from the war without signing a peace treaty with Germany. The nominally independent states of Ukraine and Poland were keen to sign a deal with Germany and thus secure some form of statehood, but Trotsky ignored them and concentrated on specifically Russian concerns. If revolution broke out in Germany, this would all be irrelevant anyway.

The Bolshevik “Left Communists” around Bukharin and Kollontai regarded a treaty with Imperial Germany as a retreat from the Bolshevik commitment to extend the revolution westward. They wanted a “revolutionary war” led by volunteer Bolshevik cadres who would suborn the German army just as they had Kornilov and Krasnov. Lenin considered this a suicidal strategy. Millions of peasant soldiers had deserted, returning home to secure the land promised them by the Land Decree. Reports from factories and urban Soviets were clear that workers did not want to resume the war, revolutionary or otherwise. When Trotsky declared at Brest-Litovsk that although Russia would not sign a peace treaty with Germany it was “leaving the war” and no longer considered itself a belligerent, the result was that the German army immediately marched into Ukraine and northern Russia, meeting absolutely no resistance.

Had it continued its advance, Petrograd would have fallen within days. After titanic arguments within Sovnarcom and the Bolshevik CC, Lenin rammed through his policy of signing any deal on the table as long as it stopped hostilities with Germany. So the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed, with acceptance of all the German conditions. It was a Carthaginian peace, requiring Russian to cede to Germany all of its Baltic territories, Poland, Finland, Ukraine and part of Belorussia. This totaled 1,267,000 square miles of territory and 55 million people (amounting to a third of the old Russian Empire and 34% of its population). It also meant the new Russian government giving up a third of its agriculture, 73% of its iron production and 75% of its coalmines.

The terms of the treaty were accepted at a special Congress of the Bolshevik Party (now renamed the Russian Communist Party, or RCP) in March 1918. The Left SRs, who like the Right SRs represented a mainly peasant constituency, many of whom lived in the territories ceded to Germany, resigned from the government in protest. The Bolsheviks were now utterly alone. With the possibility of rescue by other European revolutions receding, they tightened their grip on the new Russian state machine, which meant tightening their grip on the new society itself.

By October 1917 there were about 900 local Soviets throughout the country controlling virtually every aspect of social life from housing to hospitals, plus more than 2,000 elected Factory Committees. Lenin’s Draft Decree on Workers’ Control had declared that workers’ control was to be carried out “by all workers and employees in a given enterprise, either directly if the enterprise is small enough to permit it, or through delegates to be immediately elected at mass meetings”. But after its publication Sovnarcom clarified that all existing Factory Committees would be subject to an “All-Russian Council of Workers’ Control” (ARCWC). The ARCWC was to be made up of representatives from the Soviets and trade unions, bodies likely to be dominated by Bolsheviks, and for the time being it was the employers, not the Committees, who controlled production. In view of these provisions Brinton concluded, “The Decree on Workers’ Control proved, in practice, not to be worth the paper it was written on”. 16

When the Decree went to the Soviet Executive for ratification the Bolshevik trade union official Lozovsky said it was vital that “workers in various enterprises don’t run away with the idea that the factories belong to them”. 17The amended Decree, which gave ultimate authority to the ARCWC, was passed by the Executive and signed by Sovnarcom the next day. People’s Commissar Miliutin (who had now rejoined Sovnarcom) admitted that “legislation on Workers’ Control which should logically have fitted into the framework of an economic plan had had to precede legislation on the plan itself”. This had happened because “life overtook us” and it became necessary to “unite into one solid state apparatus the workers’ control which was being operated on the spot”. By December 1917 the number of independent Factory Committees had mushroomed to 2,100, including 68% of firms with over 200 employees. Although most of these wished for state support, and in some cases nationalisation, they did so as a means to access goods, resources, funds and specialist expertise to help them achieve their goals, not for the imposition of new management.

The problems facing the Factory Committees arose not just from social collapse but what Sirianni called “concerted sabotage by Russian capital”. 18Russian employers were, of course, hostile to the new regime. But their special hatred was reserved for the Factory Committees, who fundamentally challenged their managerial prerogatives. In response to the 14th November Decree on Workers’ Control, mine owners in the Urals and Donetz basin threatened to close mines. The Petrograd Manufacturers Association threatened to do the same to all major plants in the capital, especially those who followed the instructions of the Central Council of Factory Committees. Some employers withheld wages as economic punishment of workers who challenged them for control of the production process. The employers’ actions raised again whether workers’ control should now become workers’ self-management.

The Factory Committees were accused by both employers and Bolsheviks of not seeing the bigger picture and of disregarding the urgent need for coordinated national production. But, as David Mandel demonstrated in his study of the movement, “this argument was to a large degree disingenuous, since committee conferences consistently emphasised that workers’ control could be effective only within a framework of national economic regulation”. 19To help achieve this they planned an All-Russian Congress of Factory Committees that would create a federated structure within which regional and local committees could operate. Had this proceeded it would have been a clear threat to the hegemony of the Bolshevik Party. In response, Bolshevik trade union officials quickly mobilised to block any call for a national congress. Without a congress it was almost impossible for the Committees to create a national, federated structure of workers’ control built upon local networks.

Meanwhile the core structures of the new state began to solidify. Within six weeks of 25th October, Sovnarcom had created a secret police, the Cheka. Its remit to uncover and suppress “counter-revolutionary activities” was sufficiently wide that it would quickly begin to harass and arrest not just disaffected members of the bourgeoisie but any on the laboursocialist left who failed to support Sovnarcom. As early as 9th November , two weeks after an insurrection whose ostensible goal was to transfer all power to the Soviets, Sovnarcom unilaterally dissolved the Soviet in the Commissariat of Posts and Telegraphs. On 28th November it did the same to the Soviet in the Admiralty. On the economic front a Decree of 5th December set up a Supreme Economic Council (known as Vesenka) which was to “direct to a uniform end” the activities of all the other economic bodies in the state.