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

The EAD was an idea that emerged initially from Petrograd Mensheviks, although it was kept a non-party affair. The intention was to build “a new, representative movement from below, shedding formal party affiliations”. 36It had its first plenary meeting on 13th March, 1918, including delegates from fifteen metalworking plants, such as the Obukhov, Trebochnyi and Aleksandrovsk, whose workers had protested against the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly. On 3rd April a second plenary was held that explicitly attacked the government for “assaulting the workers’ movement with Tsarist methods”. On 7th April the Menshevik Central Committee endorsed the EAD initiative and it began to attract support in the working-class Nevsky district, as well as in outlying towns.

Rabinowitch records that the majority of delegates to the EAD “represented a significant portion of Petrograd’s most important factories and plants”. 37Their political demands were not counter-revolutionary, on the contrary they wished to revitilise and renew the revolutionary spirit of February 1917 in which so many of them had taken part, specifically by reconvening the Constituent Assembly, a central demand of the Russian revolutionary left prior to October 1917. They also demanded an end to political persecution and reintroduction of press and civil liberties gained in February 1917 but lost after October 1917. In April an EAD delegation visited Moscow and was well received by Moscow workers.

Food shortages continued. When women in the Petrograd suburb of Kolpino protested outside the local Soviet about lack of food they were fired on by Red Guards. This led to riots and strikes. When the EAD returned to Moscow in June their reception was even stronger, with delegates from towns whose Soviets had been shut down, such as Tula and Briansk, sent to Moscow to offer support. At a session of 1st June the EAD issued an appeal to Petrograd workers “to prepare the working masses for a political strike against the present regime, which in the name of the working class shoots it, throws it into prison, strangles freedom of speech, of the press, of the unions, the right to strike and workers’ representation”. 38It set 2nd July as the date for the General Strike.

This was a clear challenge to Sovnarcom and the Bolshevik Party, who used elections to the Petrograd Soviet to reassert control and crush the EAD. The official result gave the Bolsheviks a 3:1 majority in the Soviet, although many analysts of the election, such as Rabinowitch and Rosenberg, consider the result to be questionable due to intimidation of Mensheviks and SRs, severe press restrictions and dubious electoral practices. Significantly, it was the largest industrial plants such as the Putilov and the Obukhov, the best organised and most difficult to manipulate, that returned Menshevik majorities. After this the Petrograd Soviet passed a resolution condemning the EAD as counter-revolutionary. All factories were informed that if they took part in the strike they would be immediately shut down. EAD premises were raided and its leaders arrested. 39

On 28th June, a few days before the planned general strike, Sovnarcom passed the Decree on General Nationalisation. This nationalised all enterprises owned by joint-stock companies and partnerships with capital over one million rubles. The Decree opened with the statement: “To declare the following industrial and commercial enterprises situated in the territory of the Soviet Republic, with all their capital and properties in whatever form, the property of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic”. It covered the mining, textiles, metallurgical, electrical, timber, rubber, tobacco, glass and ceramics, leather and shoemaking, cement and pottery industries, along with lesser industries such as paper production with basic capital not less than 300,000 rubles, plus any remaining private local utilities and railways. Oversight and organisation fell to Vesenka. The Decree mandated that, “From the moment of the issue of this Decree, the Board members, Directors and other executives of nationalised enterprises are accountable to the Soviet Republic for their safety and normal operation”. 40

Promulgation of the Decree gave the government a plausible answer to the criticisms of the EAD and Factory Committees that it had backtracked on the promises of October and left the old bosses in charge, but it also laid the ground for Lenin’s own form of state-controlled public ownership. After the Decree it was indisputable that there had been a revolutionary change in property relations. To the end of his life Trotsky would defend the Soviet Union as a “deformed workers’ state” on the grounds that this fundamental transfer had occurred and not been reversed. Sadly, it manifested itself not in democratic workers’ control but in top-heavy state direction often imposed by oneman management. The one man worked for the state but many workers saw little difference from the old private management hierarchies.

The Decree on Nationalisation was accompanied by decisive action to repel the general strike. Machine gun regiments were stationed at railway junctions, EAD meetings were dispersed by force and its leading activists arrested. Printing plants suspected of EAD sympathies were closed. The head offices of any trade union that supported the EAD were raided and their staff arrested. Armed patrols with authority to prevent strikes were deployed around the city. The strike collapsed before it had started and the EAD threat had been dissolved. The EAD Bureau issued a hasty statement that concluded bitterly, “no government in the Russia of the Romanovs had ever taken such extreme measures to thwart a strike as the Soviet government had”.

One of the key reasons the Bolsheviks ultimately prevailed over their opponents was that the Mensheviks’ own version of state-directed democratic socialism, whilst it valued the independence of the unions and the Soviets, had little in common with the anarcho-syndicalism of the Factory Committees. Although the Factory Committees would have found a role within a democratically administered socialist system easier than within a Bolshevik one, many advocates of workers’ control distrusted the Mensheviks as much as the Bolsheviks. Thus the two great poles of working-class resistance to Bolshevik authoritarianism–the Menshevik activists of the EAD and the militant Factory Committees–did not act in synergy. Yet despite the lack of coordinated political objectives the upsurge of working-class activity in the EAD and the campaigns to defend the right of the Soviets to elect Menshevik majorities were the true heir and continuation of pre-October proletarian radicalism.

The discontent against Sovnarcom had not been confined solely to the Mensheviks. On 20th April, 1918 the Petrograd District Committee of the Bolshevik Party published the first issue of Kommunist , a journal of Left Communism edited by Bukharin and Radek which took a stand against the “labour discipline” that Sovnarcom sought to impose. Warning of “bureaucratic centralization, the rule of the commissars, the loss of independence for local Soviets and the rejection of the state-commune administered from below”, Radek wrote:

If the Russian Revolution were overthrown by violence on the part of bourgeois counter-revolution, it would rise again like a phoenix; if however it lost its socialist character and thereby disappointed the working masses, the blow would have ten times more terrible consequences for the future of the Russian and international revolution. 41

A coordinated storm of abuse from Lenin loyalists ensured that Kommunist had to transfer its operations to Moscow. Even there it could only produce three more issues before it was forced to shut down permanently.

Lenin’s own vision of socialism was set out with brutal clarity in his most important post-October statement, published in Izvestia on 28th April as “The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government”. It was a complete rejection of Left Communism. Lenin stressed the primary task of the working class was to learn how to administer a large modern economy efficiently, whilst also dealing with the crippling problems left over from the war: mass unemployment, industrial collapse, food shortages and famine. For Lenin, socialism was primarily a task of “accounting and control”. He explained: