The Russian Revolution in Retreat, 1920-24

Soviet Workers and the New Communist Elite

Simon Pirani

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134075492
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: History
• Categoria: Eastern European History

The Russian revolution of 1917 was a defining event of the twentieth century, and its achievements and failures remain controversial in the twenty-first. This book focuses on the retreat from the revolution's aims in 1920–24, after the civil war and at the start of the New Economic Policy – and specifically, on the turbulent relationship between the working class and the Communist Party in those years. It is based on extensive original research of the actions and reactions of the party leadership and ranks, of dissidents and members of other parties, and of trade union activists and ordinary factory workers. It discusses working-class collective action before, during and after the crisis of 1921, when the Bolsheviks were confronted by the revolt at the Kronshtadt naval base and other protest movements.

This book argues that the working class was politically expropriated by the Bolshevik party, as democratic bodies such as soviets and factory committees were deprived of decision-making power; it examines how the new Soviet ruling class began to take shape. It shows how some worker activists concluded that the principles of 1917 had been betrayed, while others accepted a social contract, under which workers were assured of improvements in living standards in exchange for increased labour discipline and productivity, and a surrender of political power to the party.

1 Struggling to survive

Workers in July–December 1920

The conditions for the development of the workers’ movement in Russia in 1920, when the civil war had ended but New Economic Policy (NEP) had not yet begun, were uniquely difficult. The main White armies were defeated in October-November 1919, and after that the Bolsheviks’ hold on the most important areas of Russia was relatively secure. But for another 15 months, until March 1921, they pressed ahead with economic policies developed during the civil war and based on state regulation and compulsion, which later became known as ‘war communism’. The fighting was not all over, of course, and the ‘breathing space’ in the spring of 1920 lasted only until the Polish invasion of Ukraine in May. The Red army launched a counter-offensive, which came to a disastrous halt just outside Warsaw in mid August. Peace talks with Poland began in that month, and resulted in an armistice being signed in October. The only significant White Russian army still operating by this time, that of Vrangel’ in southern Russia, was in continuous retreat from September 1920 until its final defeat in mid November. In the autumn, peasant revolts erupted in central Russia and Siberia; these increased the Bolsheviks’ sense of isolation. Nevertheless, discussions on industrial recovery and peacetime construction were underway. Most Bolshevik party leaders, and members, assumed that in peacetime the existing economic policies—state direction of production and distribution, a degree of labour compulsion, food requisitioning, the minimization of trade and experimentation with non-monetary forms of exchange—would continue, albeit with modifications. Some Bolsheviks, although not all, made super-optimistic assumptions about a possible forced march to ‘socialism’, whatever that meant in this context, by building on civil-war methods.

Characteristic of 1920 was a yawning gap between the perceptions, on one hand, of such super-optimists, whose belief in victory enabled them to undertake seemingly impossible tasks, and, on the other, of workers who may well have sided with the revolutions of 1917, but were now exhausted. In Moscow, their suffering was bearable only in comparison with the Russian provinces, where millions of people lived in conditions of social breakdown and with the imminent threat of famine. Moscow’s population had been halved since 1917, mainly by migration to the countryside, to about 1 million. Food supply was precarious. There were desperate shortages of fuel, and ‘self-supply’, i.e. the burning of any timber people could lay their hands on, was widespread. The city itself was ruined: about one-third of its houses had been destroyed, and the number of dwellings unfit for habitation had doubled. Soap and hot baths were terribly scarce, and this aggravated regular epidemics. The city’s trams were carrying one-twelfth of their 1913 passenger volume, as most had been diverted to freight duties; shortages of fuel and oats meant there were few trucks or horse-drawn carts around.¹ Industry was battered but not beaten. In late 1919, most enterprises with fewer than 10 employees were closed—but 91 per cent of those with 100–500 employees, and all but one of the 65 enterprises with more than 500 employees, were open. Lack of fuel and raw materials interrupted production incessantly. The phenomenon should not be exaggerated, though: labour commissariat statisticians estimated that the average Moscow industrial worker lost only 7.9 working days in 1920 because of down-time (i.e. lack of fuel and raw materials); far more was lost due to absenteeism, which is discussed below.² Production in 1920 in ‘civilian’ industries was at only 15 per cent of its 1913 level, although, as the Soviet historian lurii Poliakov pointed out,³ this oft-quoted statistic did not include military supply factories, many of which were running at full steam. Much of Moscow industry suffered serious shortages of labour, particularly some types of skilled labour, mainly because workers had left the city for the countryside or joined the Red army. In other cases, factories ran out of fuel and raw material first, leaving workers the choice of hanging around dormant workshops or leaving the city. This chapter will discuss some related demographic issues that have been significant for labour historians; then supply problems and their impact on working-class politics; and finally, workers’ attitudes to the Bolshevik state and party.

Workers and sluzhashchie

The exodus of workers from Russian cities during the civil war has been the subject of political and historiographical dispute. According to Bolshevik discourse, the dispersal of urbanized male workers to the Red army or the countryside, and their substitution in the factories by women, younger workers, and new migrants, had ‘deproletarianized’ the working class. This resulted in a lack of political consciousness, to which the party attributed much of the working-class opposition it faced in 1920–21. But the demography has been shown to have been far more complex than the Bolsheviks allowed. And once consciousness is measured otherwise than by the Bolsheviks’ primary standard, workers’ degree of acceptance of government policy, the interpretation of lack of consciousness as the main cause of worker-government conflict fails.

Demographically, early twentieth-century Moscow had much in common with other urban centres during industrialization. Migration from the countryside was at first mainly by young, single males; married males who moved to the city often left their families behind in the village; large-scale migration of whole families started only in the 1920s. The movement from countryside to city was not one-way, though. There was a high level of temporary migration. Workers who settled in the city often sent their children back to be cared for by relatives in the countryside, and they themselves retained plots of land and/or returned periodically to the village.⁴ Civil war brought about the drastic reduction in Moscow’s population, from about 2 million to about 1 million between 1917 and 1920.⁵ The number of industrial workers also fell by approximately half, to about 200,000, but the number of sluzhashchie (a census category that often translated as ‘white-collar staff or ‘employees’, but which also extended to other service workers) fell only slightly, to about 220,000.⁶ The contraction of the labour force was not even. By 1920, the number of workers in the metalworking sector fell to less than half of its wartime peak, i.e. to below 30,000, partly because skilled workers gravitated to other manufacturing centres.⁷ In the textile industry, the largest in terms of numbers employed, the workforce had shrunk to less than half its 1913 size, from around 250,000 to around 120,000.⁸ Food processing plants’ workforces also contracted drastically. But in the garment sector the workforce expanded by nearly a third, to about 18,000, mainly in response to demand from the Red army. And about 8500 chemical workers were working in Moscow—fewer than in 1916, but as many as there had been in 1913, partly because some production had been transferred from Petrograd and Riga.⁹

In the 1950s, citing the reductions, Isaac Deutscher argued that, at the end of the civil war, the working class was ‘pulverized’ and that ‘the proletarian dictatorship was triumphant but the proletariat had nearly vanished’. This interpretation has been disputed. From the 1970s, western social historians drew a more complex picture. Diane Koenker argued that, among the most urbanized workers, i.e. urban families, there was ‘no place to go except the Red army’ and that the young men went to the front while others remained in Moscow; that among the least urbanized Moscow workers, for example fathers with families in the countryside, the exodus had often started ‘even before the serious [supply] crises began’; and that among the middle layers with one foot in the city and one in the village, and first-generation migrants, some stayed while others left.¹⁰

The reader’s attention is drawn to two issues that have arisen in the discussions among historians. The first concerns the impact of these demographic changes on the political character of the working-class movement. Deutscher’s picture of working class politics in 1920–21, copied by some more recent socialist writers,¹¹ is so one-sided as to be misleading: the movement was ‘an empty shell’; ‘here and there, small groups of veterans of the class struggle met and argued about the prospects of the revolution’, but could not see behind them ‘the main force of their class’. My research shows, in contrast, that the workers’ movement in Moscow was, despite its numerical weakness and the burdens of civil war, engaged with political as well as industrial issues. While most textile mills were closed in 1920, much of the metalworking industry was active, often supplying the military. Political discussion continued at factory mass meetings and at the regular city-wide assemblies of metalworkers’ union delegates, a largely pro-Bolshevik bastion of organization. The records of these meetings suggest that, even though thousands of the Moscow workers who supported the October revolution had gone to the front, many others remained active in the factories; in this respect my research bears out Koenker’s conclusions. Koenker describes a ‘middling out’ of the working class, with the most politically committed going to the front, the least committed returning to the countryside, and a middle group remaining in Moscow, including the male workers mentioned and women, some of whom were their family members, joining the workforce. For Deutscher, the Soviets became ‘creatures of the Bolshevik party’ because they ‘could not possibly represent a virtually non-existent working class’. On the contrary: the working class was far from non-existent, and when, in 1921, it began to resuscitate soviet democracy, the party’s decision to make the Moscow soviet its ‘creature’ was not effect but cause.

The second issue concerns the sluzhashchie, who the Bolshevik leadership characterized as a petty-bourgeois grouping that diluted the proletarian character of the state and played a negative role in the revolution. In the early NEP period, when worker communists were moved in large numbers into the state institutions where the sluzhashchie worked, and usually into positions of authority, these ideological presumptions about the class position of the sluzhashchie sometimes merged with workerist prejudice. This discourse was subject to criticism by Daniel Orlovsky, who argued that the white-collar workers, to whom the label sluzhashchie was most readily applied, had played a dynamic role in the revolution that had been ‘invisible’ for previous historians.¹² The census category sluzhashchie, inherited from tsarist Russia, included not only white-collar staff but also a range of other social groups that may be regarded as part of, or having close affinity with, the working class. In the case of Moscow, it is striking that during the civil war, when the number of industrial workers fell so sharply, the number of sluzhashchie remained almost constant. It hardly changed during early NEP, either. The 1920 census counted in the city’s working population 205,427 workers and 223, 375 sluzhashchie; the figures did not change significantly in the 1923 census.¹³ At first sight, these figures appear to bear out oft-repeated Bolshevik complaints that the working class was being elbowed aside by armies of petty bourgeois. But the category sluzhashchie covered not only white-collar staff, but also ‘cultural-educational personnel’, almost all university staff and school teachers (16,634 of the 223, 375 sluzhashchie), and people best described as service workers: medical and health workers (22,557); communications staff such as postal, telephone and telegraph workers (9140); and security staff, mostly watchmen (15,402). The census also counted, in a category separate from industrial workers and sluzhashchie, 46,828 domestic servants (prislugi), mostly house-helps to groups of working-class families. Bolshevik ideology deemed all these groups to be either partly or completely non-proletarian, and the census methodology reflected that. Indeed many of these people may not have considered themselves to be workers. Teachers, for example, were usually thought of as members of the intelligentsia. However, in keeping with the interpretive framework proposed in the Introduction, such people may be regarded as part of the working class or as its allies. By adding to the 205,427 industrial workers the 63,733 educational and service workers, and the 46,828 domestic servants, a total of 315,988 workers is reached. These outnumber by nearly two to one the remaining 159,642 sluzhashchie, most of whom were white-collar staff.¹⁴ This group included top- and middle-ranking administrative officials who had been in similar positions under the old regime, and industrial specialists and managers.¹⁵ But its majority comprised badly-paid office workers, many of whom, along with others in urban middle layers, had been active in the revolutions of 1917. The divisions between industrial workers and sluzhashchie were real enough—the latter performed mental, rather than manual, labour—but these differences were not absolute, as Bolshevik ideology suggested. And self-perceptions among the sluzhashchie differed greatly: while many regarded themselves as non-proletarian, those in the factories saw themselves as close to their blue-collar colleagues. The minutes of mass meetings show that the two groups often assembled and voted together.¹⁶

The Bolshevik party’s discussions about the sluzhashchie and their class position often merged with, or became confused with, those about the state apparatus in which many of them worked. ‘Bureaucratism’ was recognized by all as a serious defect of the state, but whereas to some it had a political meaning, i.e. it signified a lack of participatory democracy, to others it meant inefficiency and red tape (volokita). The sluzhashchie, as bearers of alien class pressure, were an important cause of bureaucratism, according to the view prevalent in the Bolshevik leadership.¹⁷ While this analysis was not universally accepted, there was broad agreement among the Bolsheviks and their political opponents that the state apparatus was far too big, and disastrously ineffective, and that staff numbers should be cut. Moscow’s role as the Soviet capital exacerbated this problem in the city. For example in 1920 Moscow had, among those 159,642 white-collar staff, 58,185 ‘filin...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations, acronyms and Russian words used
• Map: Moscow in 1922
• Note on names and biographical information
• Introduction: workers and the Soviet state
• 1 Struggling to survive: workers in July-December 1920
• 2 Sweet visions and bitter clashes: the party in July-December 1920
• 3 The revolution that wasn’t: workers and the party in January-March 1921
• 4 The NEP and non-partyism: workers in 1921
• 5 Renegades, oppositionists, suicides and administrators: the party in 1921
• 6 Mass mobilization versus mass participation: workers in 1922
• 7 The party elite, industrial managers and the cells: the party in 1922
• 8 The social contract in practice: workers in 1923
• 9 The elite takes charge: the party in 1923–24
• Conclusions: the impact on socialism
• Appendix 1. Biographical information
• Appendix 2. Districts and workplaces
• Appendix 3. Wages and currency rates
• Appendix 4. Party membership
• Appendix 5. Communists’ occupations
• Bibliography